Bloom County's Berkeley Breathed outs ... Garfield?

Here's an odd one: Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, whose weekly spinoff Opus runs weekly on Salon.com, recently ran a pointed and rather confounding strip (the above is just a glance, click the liknk for the full, legible version) addressing Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's outing of Albus Dumbledore after the book series was completed.

It seems that there's a little finger-pointing going on, some of it self-directed. Breathed is calling out Rowling for waiting until after the books were finished to out Dumbledore, but then seems to joke that he's even more of a "lily-livered coward" for not even having the nerve to out his own character, opting to out a rival instead.

I'm honestly not that familiar with Bloom County or Opus, but I understand that Breathed outed one of his characters, Steve Dallas, in the eleventh hour, only to bring him back in a later strip and give him the "ex-gay" treatment. Breathed later said in interviews that he found himself censored by skittish sponsors and wasn't even allowed to use the word "gay" in his strips after a certain point, which may have led to the Dallas coda or this potentially self-skewering afterthought.

But really, the most bizarre thing about the strip is that Breathed has rendered himself as an effete, lavender-sweatered, limp-wristed dandy holding a martini and a cigarette. From what I've been able to find, Breathed looks nothing like this (there he is at left), and many of the strip's commentors seem to think that it's intended to be a portrait of a young Sean Connery. I think it looks more like Jeff Lewis from Flipping Out, but that's an even more alarming interpretation.

Any thoughts on all this? I'll admit I'm really not able to offer much on this one other than that when it comes to outing Garfield, The Daily Show's Samantha Bee did it years ago.