Berkeley Breathed

Berkeley ("Berke") Breathed (last name rhymes with "method") is a cartoonist, children's book author/illustrator, director and screenwriter, best known for Bloom County, a 1980s cartoon-comic strip which dealt with socio-political issues, as seen through the eyes of highly exaggerated characters (e.g. Bill the Cat and Opus the Penguin) and humorous analogies.

Cartooning career

His first regularly published strip was Academia Waltz which appeared in the Daily Texan in 1978. The strip attracted the editors of the Washington Post who recruited him to do a nationally syndicated strip. On December 8, 1980, Bloom County made its debut, and featured some of the characters from Academia Waltz including former frat-boy Steve Dallas and the paralyzed Vietnam war veteran Cutter John. In the beginning, the strip's style was so close to that of another popular strip, Doonesbury, that creator Garry Trudeau wrote Breathed several times to point out the similarities.

Related Topics:
Washington Post - December 8 - 1980 - Steve Dallas - Vietnam war - Cutter John - Doonesbury - Garry Trudeau

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Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. The strip eventually appeared in over 1200 newspapers around the world until Berkeley retired the daily strip in 1989.

Related Topics:
Pulitzer Prize - Editorial cartooning - 1989

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He replaced this strip with the surreal Sunday-only cartoon Outland in 1989, which reused some of the Bloom County characters, including Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat. He ended Outland in 1995, stating that he wanted to terminate the strip while it was still popular. At that time, he said, "A good comic strip is no more eternal than a ripe melon. The ugly truth is that in most cases, comics age less gracefully than their creators."

Related Topics:
Outland - 1989 - Opus the Penguin - Bill the Cat - 1995

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Eight years later, Breathed began producing the comic strip Opus, a Sunday-only strip featuring Opus, the penguin who was one of the central characters in Bloom County. He colors the cartoon himself with Adobe Photoshop, claiming that the advances in technology since 1990 have created an opportunity for "something that looks cool on a comic page."

Related Topics:
Opus - Opus - Adobe Photoshop - 1990

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