Berkeley breathed gesundheit free#
He draws four conventional panels even though he has free rein to draw nine, or one, or 20. On his Facebook page, Breathed posts new strips daily-or near-daily-even though he’s under no obligation from a syndicate to do so. Aside from the Sunday strip Opus, which ran from 2003 to 2008, Breathed considered that chapter in his creative life closed.
It was the last gasp of relevance for comics as a whole, which were about to be set adrift by the internet’s demolition of newspaper subscriptions. Saying that a quality feature “is no more eternal than a ripe melon,” he ended the daily strip in 1989 but continued with the Sunday-only Outland featuring some of the same characters.īreathed, Watterson, and The Far Side’s Gary Larson all decided to wrap up their strips in 1995. It was disguised as a funny-animal strip, passing along Breathed’s skewering of politics as smoothly as Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes dissected childhood. He was opposite me at Comic-Con and I thought for a few seconds whether I could muster up even a few seconds of polite conversation. I came up empty.”īreathed collected a Pulitzer in 1987 for editorial cartooning, an odd distinction considering Bloom County never appeared on editorial pages. “If there are two humans on the planet with less in common, it would be Jim and myself, honestly. His Mortimer Mouse, “brother” of Mickey and a prolific alcoholic, drew the ire of Disney’s legal department Bill, an orange tabby who rarely manages any commentary beyond drooling, began as a spoof of the ubiquitous Garfield. More than any other strip of the era, Breathed enjoyed poking the biggest bears he could find.
We did provide the final nail into the rabbit testing coffin of Mary Kay … but it’s hard to repeat. “A rare foray into satirical advocacy, if that might be a term,” Breathed says. The ensuing public outcry led Mary Kay to eliminate most of the testing practices that were alleged to be cruel. Played for laughs, it was also a sharp commentary on the controversy regarding the company and its treatment of animals. In what was arguably the strip’s most potent story, Opus breaks into a Mary Kay Cosmetics animal testing facility to liberate his penguin mother. “He called me a poor man’s Doonesbury in the '80s,” Breathed says. Donald Trump, best known at the time as an outspoken real estate magnate, once had his brain implanted into the body of drug burnout Bill the Cat. Both were a kind of penciled-in Daily Show for the times, questioning popular rhetoric and lampooning the names that dominated the decade. Of the five, only Doonesbury and Bloom County were attempting topical references with popular political and cultural figures. All of the strips lent a subversive and skewed perspective to a page overrun by empty fare like Blondie and Ziggy. As it should have been.”īeginning in 1985, it was possible to open a newspaper and see Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Doonesbury, The Far Side, and Bloom County running simultaneously. I’ll confess that I love the ridiculousness of that process. “After 26 years of ridiculing the notion of doing it again. “I deliberated for five minutes,” Breathed tells mental_floss. He found some old art boards he used for Bloom County, and he considered whether it had been an error to neglect his small-town cast for the past 25 years.ĭays later, the first new Bloom County strip since the ‘80s was posted on his Facebook page. To clear his mind, Breathed pulled out the letters he had received from Lee over the years complimenting his work and begging him never to “kill” Opus. To Breathed, it felt as though Lee-who passed away on February 19, 2016-had lost control of her character. It drew controversy for depicting Lee's protagonist, Atticus Finch, as a segregationist. In 2015, Breathed was dismayed to see an earlier draft of Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning book published under the title Go Set a Watchman. It was a fan named Harper Lee, who just happened to be the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who made him reconsider. There would be no more mention of adolescent political journalist Milo Bloom, the neurotic Opus, or the seemingly lobotomized Bill the Cat. Breathed moved on to illustrated books, feature films, and two spin-off Sunday strips. The targets of his satire-1980s excess, Reaganomics, and Garfield-had run their course. For 26 years, Berkeley Breathed rejected the notion of ever resurrecting Bloom County, his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip that ran from 1980 to 1989.
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