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| Steve Dallas | |
|---|---|
| Bloom County,Opus character | |
 | |
| Created by | Berkeley Breathed |
| In-universe information | |
| Nationality | American |
Steve Dallas is a fictional character in the American comic strips ofBerke Breathed, most famouslyBloom County in the 1980s.
He was first introduced as an obnoxiousfrat boy in the college stripThe Academia Waltz, which ran in theUniversity of Texas'sDaily Texan during 1978 and 1979.[1] Steve then reappears inBloom County after graduation as a self-employed, unscrupulous lawyer.
He was the first character to have been featured in all four of Breathed's comic strips. He appeared regularly, albeit much older, in the Sunday-onlyOpus.
On June 12, 2013, Steve Dallas made aguest appearance inPearls Before Swine.
In the early days ofBloom County, Steve was usually seen hitting on schoolteacherBobbi Harlow, whom he briefly dated and failed to woo back once she left him forCutter John. He frequently dated Bobbi's dimwitted cousin, Quiche Loraine, to make her jealous (the plan did not work).
Most residents of Bloom County, especially women, either despised him or indifferently tolerated his presence. The one exception wasOpus the Penguin, who idolized him and tagged along with him like a younger brother. Steve often used Opus' hero worship to manipulate the hapless penguin into doing his dirty work (although occasionally Steve was heard to have threatened Opus into helping him instead).
He was often shown to hold stronglyconservative political positions (albeit to a lesser extent than inThe Academia Waltz), to the extent that theReagan White House's policies were only sometimes enough to satisfy him. (He remarked early in the President's tenure that he thought "Haig andthe generals should run Reagan and his liberal pack right out of the White House.") However, both he and the other (mostly liberal) characters became less hostile to Reagan's policies as both the strip's run and Reagan's tenure ran on. In another strip, a flashback of Dallas's teenage years showed him reading conservative authorWilliam F. Buckley's bookGod and Man at Yale.
Dallas did not, however, seem to hold the traditionalist religious moral principles that were associated with Reagan and his allies on the right at the time, as his womanizing and lack of religious practice would indicate. He once went so far as to say that, "My God. We've got to getCarter back inthe White House" after associatingRonald Reagan's presidency with the end of theSexual revolution and therefore the end of his conquests at "Bob's Bar & Flesh Market". Like most conservatives (andliberals, and others) portrayed in Breathed's work, Steve's political positions do not appear to stem from actual convictions.
As a lawyer, Steve took on hopeless cases defendingpsychotic and obviously guilty criminals and murderers, much to the chagrin of his overbearing mother. On one occasion, hedid win a case (his client had allegedly murdered her husband with anaxe), but only because the jury cared more about what the woman wore than whether or not she was innocent (at one point, she found a plasticpicnic knife and supposedly tried to make afillet out of aCNN cameraman). A bachelor throughout the entire run of the strip, he was the most aggressive womanizer and most blatantmale chauvinist of all the eligible males in the cartoon.
Outside of the courts, Steve's professionalism was questionable. In one instance he attempts to collect from a past due client by saying "Attention criminal pervert, where the hell is my dough, you twisted goon?". Opus, however, who at the time is working as aparalegal, writes in the actual letter "We still await payment of your legal fee".
He was briefly the manager ofBilly and the Boingers, aDef Leppard-esqueglam metal band consisting of Opus,Bill the Cat, and Hodge-Podge.
Steve briefly became a different person shortly after he was abducted byaliens. On board their spaceship, the aliens had originally planned to transplantElvis Presley's brain into Steve's head. However, after Steve threatened the aliens with alawsuit, they decided to perform the "Gephardtization" process on him instead, which was the same procedure used previously on then-U.S. House Majority LeaderDick Gephardt to completely reverse opinions and attitudes. After being presumed dead by the residents of Bloom County, Steve was zapped back to earth a few days later. To the whole county's amazement, he was now a sensitive, caring liberal andfeminist. He stopped wearing his trademark sunglasses, quit smoking, got aperm[2] (thinking it made him look likeAlan Alda), andcanvassed forJesse Jackson's 1988 Presidential campaign.
This carried on for about a year, until Steve found out that his girlfriend Gladys was cheating on him with the bassist for "Guns 'n Spittle" and Opus had been using histoothbrush to comb hisnose hair. Devastated, he resolved to forever avenge feminine betrayal, and by doing so, he put his trademark sunglasses back on. He immediately returned to his old, cantankerous self.[3]
During the closing down ofBloom County in the final days of the strip, Steve seeks employment in other strips. He is seen (in the strip) to land a guest spot inCathy, much to the title character's horror. (Many years later, in the revivedBloom County, the Cathy character slept with Steve Dallas, and regretted it in the morning.)
Steve remains a major character in the revival ofBloom County.
At the end ofOutland in 1995, Steve came out ofthe closet and admitted he was gay. In his final appearance in the comic, he hadmarried a man (Doonesbury'sMark Slackmeyer) and was thinking aboutadopting children.
However, inOpus nine years later, Steve was back to his babe-mongering ways after enrolling in the "Rev. Doogle De-Poofta" which usedshock therapy to attempt to "cure" homosexuality; in a form ofconversion therapy. Steve was depicted as a middle-aged man with thinning hair and a noticeable paunch.
Steve was also reunited with his long-lost son Augie (presumably named afterAugie Doggie), and reluctantly took on the role of father figure. The August 26, 2007 strip implied that he was romantically involved with the recently re-introduced characterLola Granola, a former love interest of Opus.
Breathed has stated that Dallas was based on a real person.
Steve Dallas...a frat-boy lawyer who I knew in school. He's never written me. I suspect he was shot by an annoyed girlfriend, which saved me many legal fees[4]
The name "Steve Dallas" also appears in the classic and cynical noir filmSweet Smell of Success, wherein a cool jazz musician named Steve Dallas dates the wrong girl (kid sister of a sinister and influential columnist played byBurt Lancaster) and gets set up for a drug bust as a result.
In the 2013 movieAre You Here, Owen Wilson plays 'Steve Dallas', an inveterate womanizer. In one scene, Dallas is slumped in a recliner wearing sunglasses just as his Bloom County namesake often does.
