baldness, launching a hair-tonic business for the Jones family until the government declared the tonic a controlled substance. Subsequently, the price of the tonic skyrocketed, and the Bloom County gang soon found themselves running a lucrative underground hair-tonic cartel, only to have it collapse when the government later decriminalized the tonic. The Grand Unification Theory Oliver began an escalating rivalry with Stephen Hawking after learning that they were both seeking an equation that explained the universe. Oliver wrote a letter to Hawking, ridiculing his mathematical abilities; Hawking responded by mailing Oliver a thermonuclear bomb. Oliver eventually beat Hawking to the equation and attempted to explain it to Opus. Under closer examination, the equation disproved the existence of flightless waterfowl, inadvertently erasing Opus from existence. Checking his sums, Oliver discovered that he "forgot to carry the two" and corrected the equation, which restored Opus but rendered the equation useless. References Bloom County characters Comics characters introduced in 1983 Fictional African-American people Fictional hackers Fictional American people Fictional inventors American comics characters