Cutter John

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Cutter John
Bloom County character
Created by	Berkeley Breathed
In-universe information
Gender	Male
Nationality	American

Cutter John is a fictional character in the 1980s

.

Cutter, a

).

Cutter claims he was injured outside

tunnel rat

during the war.

In one story arc, he and Opus the Penguin were lost at sea (after Oliver Wendell Jones had converted Cutter's wheelchair into a helium balloon) while attempting to cause havoc at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. (their goal was to turn the South African ambassador black).

Having blown off course and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, Cutter was captured by a Soviet submarine and held as a spy. Opus developed amnesia during the incident and found his way back to the Bloom Boardinghouse, and told everyone what had happened once his memory returned. Eventually Cutter was traded for Bill the Cat, who had apparently been moonlighting as a spy. He appeared much less often after that. In one Sunday strip, it is revealed that "Cutter John's" true name is Cutter Jeff. He prefers to be called Cutter John, though.

Cutter John is one of Breathed's oldest characters, first appearing in

. In the commentary in one of the Bloom County collections, Breathed observed that he dropped Cutter John from the strip because it was too artistically challenging and "frustrating" to draw someone sitting down in every panel of the comic. According to Breathed, a wheelchair-using fan of the strip, upon hearing this observation, said Breathed "ought to try sitting in a wheelchair [himself] for real frustration". In the revival Bloom County strips, Cutter John has been seen standing with the aid of forearm crutches.

His sole appearance in Breathed's last strip, Opus, comes in a one-panel cameo, alongside Bill the Cat, Michael Binkley, Milo Bloom, and Oliver Wendell Jones, when Steve Dallas "flashes back" and sees them shortly before going to see Opus in the Animal Shelter in the strip's final storyline. This makes Cutter the second character (after Dallas) to appear in all four of Breathed's comics.

He returns in the 2015 Bloom County revival, where after accidentally running her over during one of his pop culture mash-up fantasies, begins dating Cozy Fillerup, who lives in the Bloom Boarding House.

References