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Steve Dallas

Steve Dallas is a fictional character in the American comic strips of Berke Breathed, most famously Bloom County in the 1980s.

He was first introduced as an obnoxious frat boy in the college strip The Academia Waltz, and reappears in Bloom County after graduation as a self-employed, unscrupulous lawyer.

At present, he is the only character to be featured in all four of Breathed's comic strips. He now appears regularly, albeit much older, in the Sunday-only Opus.

In the early days of Bloom County, Steve was usually seen hitting on schoolteacher Bobbi Harlow, whom he briefly dated and failed to ever woo back once she left him for Cutter John. He frequently dated Bobbi's dimwitted cousin, Quiche, to make her jealous (it didn't work).

Most residents of Bloom County, especially women, either despised him or indifferently tolerated his presence. The one exception was Opus 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).

As a lawyer, Steve took on hopeless cases defending psychotic criminals and murderers, much to the chagrin of his overbearing mother. A bachelor throughout the entire run of the strip, he was the most aggressive womanizer and most blatant male chauvinist of all the eligible males in the cartoon.

He was briefly the manager of Billy and the Boingers, a Def Leppard-esque hair metal band consisting of Opus, Bill the Cat, and Hodge-Podge.

Steve briefly became a different, better (albeit still annoying) person shortly after he was abducted by aliens. While immediately presumed dead by the residents of Bloom County, he was zapped back to earth a few days later. To the whole county's amazement, he was now a sensitive, caring liberal and feminist. He also stopped wearing his trademark sunglasses, quit smoking, and got a perm. The aliens had originally planned on putting Elvis' brain in Steve's head, but eventually decided to use the "Gepahardization Process" which they had previously used on Dick Gephardt.

This carried on for about a year, until Steve found out that his girlfriend was cheating on him. Devastated, he resolved to forever avenge feminine betrayal, and put his trademark sunglasses back on. He immediately returned to his old, cantankerous self.

At the end of Outland in 1995, Steve came out of the closet and admitted he was gay. In his final appearance in the comic, he had married a man (Doonesbury's Mark Slackmeyer, in an unlicensed cameo typical of Breathed's work) and was thinking about adopting children.

However, in Opus nine years later, Steve was back to his babe-mongering ways after enrolling in the "Rev. Doogle De-Poofta Program," which used shock therapy to "cure" homosexuality.

Steve was also recently reunited with his long-lost son Auggie, and has reluctantly taken on the role of father figure.