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Berke Breathed Interview in The Onion
Hobart writes "Berke Breathed, author of Bloom County has granted an interview to Tasha Robinson of the The Onion's AV Club. This is the second interview I've seen in six months (previous interview link) after the six years of silence since the end of Outland. He even calls for volunteers to help with his site! ;)"
More important than your career or your pet peeve -- your family.
My fantasy is to have Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbes, & Bloom County all running at once.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Since then, Breathed, Watterson, and Larson have all retired and the newspaper comics aren't very enjoyable for me today. Occasionally Fox Trot will still be amusing, and of course Dilbert is very witty, but you never get a chance to see anything impressive visually. Maybe the internet will pick up the slack? Sluggy Freelance (to pick a random example) has had amazing storylines spanning months, and the artist is free to create whatever kind of strip he wants, without censorship, ridiculous format demands, or any other unnecessary crap. Now, if only being profitable was easier...
Berke's belief that he is less relevant today could possibly be justified, but I think that comes from his being so ahead of the times. Outland expressed the kind of self-referential humor that we take for granted after shows about nothing and the Simpsons. The denizens of Bloom County were far ahead of their time, and reading the strips today isn't the same as during the supply-side days of Regan. He helped create the ironic, self-immolating humor that we have today.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
From the interview:
Throughout cartoon history, there aren't any--repeat, ANY--primary animal cartoon characters that are females. If one was female, she was primarily a girlfriend to the main character. Minnie Mouse. Look at kids' TV. If there's a female character in a big furry suit on Barney or Sesame Street, she has long eyelashes and flits and flutters about like some nightmarish caricature from Jerry Falwell's wet dream.
Two words: Dot Warner.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
... If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize." - Berke Breathed.
Well, Berke, I must say, I know of someone who still takes himself seriously. His name is Jack Valenti, and he says things like this:
"If we have to file a thousand lawsuits a day, we'll do it." -JV.
There you go, if you start cartooning again, you can pick on him. Personally, I need to go pick dinner out of my beard, and build me a wheelchair to go dandeylion stomping in. It's probably just like building a bicycle, you never forget. By the way, Opus is an idiot, right?
Good luck with everything.
Sincerely,
Sheldon.
"A coward is incapable of causing destruction; it is the prerogative of the brave" - Mahatma Ghandi
You're obviously too young to have appreciated Peanuts in its prime, and not quite smart enough to have appreciated it in its renaissance. It was never about "stale 1950's nostalgia". Perhaps the only nostalgic thing about it was the notion that kids still had the initiative to organize their own sports activities like they once did. Rent The Sandlot to get a clue as to how that worked and why it was such an ideal vehicle for humor centered on children.
But Peanuts really became iconic in the '60s and early '70s. That was the time when its message, such as it was, really jelled and began to resonate with a large public. Charlie Brown's alienation was something never before seen in a mainstream comic strip, and those times found in him a sympathetic character.
It's true that the '80s were the doldrums for Peanuts. It had become repetitious, dependent on a limited number of motifs and situations. The characters ossified and many of them dropped out of sight. I stopped reading it in those days and rarely gave it a glance until a couple of years ago. By then Schulz had got it back. Maybe that vacation he took in 1997 recharged his batteries, but the strip had recovered it's old energy. It became more daring, self-aware, surreal, and even a little biting.
Schulz was not above taking the occasional shot at other cartoonists either. Take this strip from September of 1999. Lucy and Linus's brother Rerun is sitting next to a nameless little girl in kindergarten. They're supposed to be drawing flowers.
Note: mere sarcasm isn't always funny. That was the problem with Outland IMO. When it wasn't simply infantile it was sarcastic without being witty. Then it died, and few mourned.------
And the brethren went away edified.
I remember when Oliver Wendell Jones received a huge grant to develop a space based missile defense system.
His plan was brilliant. Cover the earth with a net made out of dollar bills.
Completely relevant for today. I can't believe Berke thinks his stuff has lost it's meaning.
I also can't believe the American public still puts up with all the money we're wasting on Star Wars.
No man is an island, but some men are peninsulas
As true as that may be, C&H was consistently wonderful across its lifetime. The same cannot be said for Peanuts whose charm faded and faded. Watterson knew when to call it quits.
Like the old comics' saying, wrap it up when you've got them laughing.
I can't be the only one whose blood pressure goes up every time I see a Calvin decal on a car window, since they're not only rude, lame and unoriginal, they're blatantly treading on the wishes of Calvin's creator, who is dead set against licensed C&H merchandise of any kind. It would be entirely wrong of me to suggest that the motto "NICE RIPOFF, MORON!" be keyed onto any such car. Stronger epithets for those showing Calvin urinating on anything would be even more wrongheaded, and doing so on the driver's door, where the idiot would see it every time they got in their car, would be yet more effective, er, satisfying, that is to say, inappropriate. The ones with him kneeling in front of the cross are at least a little less crass, albeit wildly hypocritical. Piety and theft just don't mix.
Brethed says he avoids race but I remember 3 strips that dealt with it directly. One involving a flesh-coloured band-aid, one involving 'flesh' crayons, and a third where the young black kid buys a copy of 'ebony', and the little white kid tries to buy a copy of the ficticious 'ivory' to which the proprieter says something like 'shoo! i run a progressive newstand here!'. Maybe not dealing with it so serious, but to a 12-year-old it seemed like advanced socialogical debate ;)