In the tradition of many other popular characters, Opus apparently died (while unwillingly brought along on a balloon expedition to Washington, DC, to zap the ambassador from apartheid-era South Africa with a ray that would temporarily turn him black) only to return with amnesia. He later regained his memory after being in a state of intense and total shock; he heard an erroneous report that Diane Sawyer (on whom he had an enormous crush) had married Eddie Murphy. Another story line led Opus, in search of his mother, to a Mary Kay Cosmetics testing building, which he was shocked to find out was cruelly using animals as test subjects for various cosmetics. Another memorable story line featured Opus being the subject of moral scorn as a perpetrator of "penguin lust". He fled Bloom County, and was absent for a long time, eventually reappearing lost in the desert, before his mother came to him in a hallucination and told him to return to his home. In another story, Opus wrote an autobiography, "A Penguin's Story", which nobody bought. Milo Bloom later rewrote the memoir, exaggerating and fabricating most of it, in his typical fashion. The new, scandalous memoir, entitled "Naked Came I", became a bestseller in the Bloom County universe, leading Opus to even more notoriety than he had as Bill the Cat's running mate.