Bloom County Walkout was a story that ran in Berke Breathed comic strip Bloom County in 1988. The storyline revolves around a strike that the actors that played the characters in the comic strip undertook.
In the story, the "actors" playing the "characters" in Bloom County went out on strike against the Bloom County Productions, Inc, and its fat, greedy boss, W.A. Thornhump III. The issue at stake here is the shrinking size of Newspaper comics (something Breathed has often commented on in his strip). After several dozen strips, in which the management attempted to hire scabs to replace the characters, the strike was resolved, without the union winning their point.
As a story line, it was interesting because it was probably the first Bloom County storyline to totally break the fourth wall. While before Bloom County had occasionally had interactions between the characters and the narrator, or instances where the characters would interrupt the strip to update the reader on the proceedings, in this strip, it was revealed that the entire comic strip of Bloom County was a "show" being put on by actors, albeit actors that seemed to have identical identities to the characters they portrayed. This was perhaps the beginning of the later Bloom County era, when both the artwork and the storylines would become increasingly surreal.