T Campbell's Blog

When Opus returned to papers a couple years ago, a few people made a big deal of the fact that you couldn't find it online, at least not on any regular basis. As the strip debuted, Breathed had some choice words about "the damn Internet and the snarky little office imps -- especially ones around newsrooms -- who feel they need to upload everything they can get their sticky little digital digits on." In its offline-only status, Opus stood apart from virtually all other newspaper strips. I wondered whether this strategy of "playing hard to get" would pay off for Breathed. Would readers want more of what they couldn't have?

Apparently not.

Opus' offline-only status has quietly eroded, and at this point you can get all of Opus through Breathed's own site (under the guise of sampling apron patterns). Breathed was one of the most popular cartoonists of the 1980s, and if he wasn't able to fight the Internet, then I wouldn't advise anyone else to try.