Berkeley Breathed
Berkeley Breathed
Guy Berkeley "Berke" Breathedis an American cartoonist, children's book author/illustrator, director and screenwriter, best known for Bloom County, a 1980s cartoon-comic strip and more recent Internet cartoons that reflect sociopolitical issues as understood by fanciful charactersand through humorous analogies. Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth21 June 1957
CityEncino, CA
CountryUnited States of America
The digital world has allowed me a connection with my reader that I'd never had before. I didn't meet the people who read my material. The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that'd done them for a living. And I didn't have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn't have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it.
Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.
I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.
The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.
I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child - which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
I hate smoothies. Because they won't offer Firestone IPA beer as an ingredient.
And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.
'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.
I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I'd spent a childhood in a far different place.