I was a kid who got up every morning to make enough extra time to read the funnies in their entirety. I followed Mary Worth for years and will never understand any appeal to that strip that wasn't entirely ironic, but read it every day in order to not miss the one or two days per year where something actually happened.* Like every other kid of the early 1980's, I liked Garfield first, and spread out to the rest of the comics page thanks to, first, stuff like Peanuts and Tumbleweeds, and later The Far Side and, of course, Calvin and Hobbes.
Back then, syndicated comic strips were big, big business. Because strips appeared in the paper, you bought collections, the cartoonists would sell dolls, t-shirts, etc... Maybe even cartoons, like Peanuts. But if you did well, you could become a household name.
I don't remember exactly when I first noticed Bloom County, but I do remember my brother purchasing the first collection somewhere along the line. He kept reading, bursting into laughter, then showing me the strip, so we wound up sitting on the floor reading it together, laughing so hard we cried.
