He was first introduced as an obnoxious frat boy in the college strip The Academia Waltz, which ran in the University of Texas's Daily Texan during 1978 and 1979.

In the early days of Bloom County, Steve was usually seen hitting on schoolteacher Bobbi Harlow, whom he briefly dated and failed to woo back once she left him for Cutter John.

(He remarked 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.")

In another strip, a flashback of Dallas's teenage years showed him reading conservative author William F. Buckley's book God and Man at Yale.

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 picnic knife and supposedly tried to make a fillet out of a CNN cameraman).

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.

He stopped wearing his trademark sunglasses, quit smoking, got a perm[2] (thinking it made him look like Alan Alda), and canvassed for Jesse Jackson's 1988 Presidential campaign.

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 Spittle" and Opus had been using his toothbrush to comb his nose hair.

The August 26, 2007 strip implied that he was romantically involved with the recently re-introduced character Lola Granola, a former love interest of Opus.

I suspect he was shot by an annoyed girlfriend, which saved me many legal fees[4] The name "Steve Dallas" also appears in the classic and cynical noir film Sweet Smell of Success, wherein a cool jazz musician named Steve Dallas dates the wrong girl (kid sister of a sinister and influential columnist played by Burt Lancaster) and gets set up for a drug bust as a result.