Steve Dallas - in Bloom County

In Bloom County

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 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 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).

He was often shown to hold strongly conservative political positions (albeit to a lesser extent than in The Acadamia Waltz), to the extent that the Reagan White House's policies, staunchly and unchallenged conservative especially at the time they were implemented, were only sometimes enough to satisfy him, with him remarking early in the President's tenure that he thought "Haig and the generals should run Reagan and his liberal pack right out of the White House", though both he and the other (mostly liberal) characters became less hostile to Reagan's policies as both the strips run and Reagan's tenure ran on. In another strip, a flashback of Dallas's teenage years showed him reading William F. Buckley's book God 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 get Carter back in the White House" after associating Ronald Reagan's presidency with the end of the Sexual revolution and therefor the end of his conquests at "Bob's Bar & Flesh Market". Like most conservatives (and liberals, 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 defending psychotic criminals and murderers, much to the chagrin of his overbearing mother. On one occasion, he did win a case (his client had allegedly murdered her husband with an axe), 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 plastic knife and supposedly tried to make a fillet out of a CNN cameraman). 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 glam metal band consisting of Opus, Bill the Cat, and Hodge-Podge.

Steve briefly became a different, better, person shortly after he was abducted by aliens. On board their spaceship, the aliens had originally planned to transplant Elvis Presley's brain into Steve's head. However, after Steve threatened the aliens with a lawsuit, they decided to perform the "Gephardtization" process on him instead, which was the same procedure used previously on then-U.S. House Majority Leader Dick 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 and feminist. He also stopped wearing his trademark sunglasses, quit smoking, and got a perm, thinking it made him look like Alan Alda.

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' Roses" and Opus had been using his toothbrush to comb his nose 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.

During the closing down of Bloom 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 in Cathy, much to that title character's horror.