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! ;)"

Comments

I always knew he wasn't a nice guy, but come on!

[CaptainCarrot]

From the interview:

Even Sparky Schulz never owned the Peanuts characters. Technically, they could have fired him and hired college kids to do the strip. Maybe they did, for those last 20 years. Good ol' Sparky. He was our Elvis, in his prime.

What an insulting remark. Breathed himself should have had the talent Schulz carried around in his little finger, even in his driest years -- which were not his last. I recently picked up a collection of all the comics from Peanuts' last year and was pleasantly surprised to see that Schulz was back in top form. Yeah, his lines were made a little shaky by that hand tremor he suffered from that never quite went away. But he always wrote and drew that strip himself, and took not a single break from its beginning in 1950 until a 5 week vacation in 1997. (But hey, the man had just turned 75, so he deserved a vacation.)

I'll not deny that starting, oh, about the time Bloom County was just beginning it looked as if Schulz had settled down into a kind of routine cuteness that lacked much of his old originality. But by his last years, he was rockin' again. Old characters we hadn't seen in years reappeared and the humor really started to click again. As I was reading that last year's worth of strips I found myself laughing out loud more than once. Which is something I can't say about the strips Breathed produced his last year on the job.

It was also well-known that Schulz always insisted that the strip was written and drawn by no one but himself. Breathed, the man was your better. Have more respect.

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