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
If I could have drawn a cat yelling for lasagna every day for 15 years and have them pay me $30 million to do so, I would have.
The comic page is dying; I didn't want to go with it.
Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.
Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books.
And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.
Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.
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.