HAPPY TRAILS<i> by Berke Breathed (Little, Brown: $8.95) </i>

Berke Breathed saddened millions of readers when he ended his popular comic strip, “Bloom County,” last September. But this uneven final anthology doesn’t represent his best work and suggests that he had lost interest in the strip. A long sequence in which Donald Trump’s brain is transplanted into Bill the Cat’s head lacks the iconoclastic edge of Breathed’s better satires--e.g. Oliver Wendell Jones’ “Star Wars” plan to trap enemy missiles in an orbiting net of dollar bills. The spoofs of other strips at the character’s wrap party recall the gleeful irreverence that made “Bloom County” popular, and the final image of Opus the Penguin trudging away as the familiar settings recede into the mist is surprisingly poignant. Breathed has said that a comic strip is a fragile entity with a life cycle of its own; “Happy Trails” suggests that he was right. Ave atque vale.