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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! ;)"
However, YMMV
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
The boondocks by Aaron McGruder is some of the funniest stuff i've read in a long time.
http://www.boondocks.net/
BB: I entered as a joke and a bet with my brother-in-law that I could name a price that a dot-com would refuse to pay. The bastards paid.
Also, as I have aged (but not by much ;)) it's been nice to notice how I can relate more and more to Calvin and Hobbes; it was funny when I was younger, and now it's funny on a whole new level. I tells ya, that boy's got it sussed.
(And kudos to Bill anyway, for never succumbing to the demands of the the syndicate to license C&H.)
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
> More important than your career or your pet
> peeve -- your family.
You may want to rethink that sentiment. No matter what your typical slashdot reader thinks, the word "family" doesn't include your computer.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I think of it this way: Zippy usually aims to be as humorous as possible without actually trying to be funny.
Zippy strips invite you to observe and think about things in a humorous and somewhat cynical frame of mind. While they are sometimes extremely funny, they more often avoid the kind of release of tension you would get with a laugh and prefer to leave things a bit off key - like a piano piece played expertly then deliberately ended on a wrong note. Zippy leads you away from, around, and finally obliquely back to the subject. When you arrive it has a quality something like being funny, but usually more muted and self-conscious. Or at least that's how I experience it -- maybe others find them routinely laugh out loud funny.
Just my $0.02.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Tux is definitely the winner in the sheer cuteness department, but I bet Opus could take him in a deathmatch! ;-)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
You can find an interview from last February here.
More important than your career or your pet peeve -- your family.
All I have to say is "THPTF"
I'd be more inclined to agree with you if a single one of my non-hacker friends liked either Dilbert or Bloom County. Most of my non-work friends haven't even heard of Bloom County.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
IIRC, Watterson doesn't do interviews. Period.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
When did I say that my friends were pre-pubescent when Bloom County was in production? Most of my friends are in their thirties and forties. They still weren't familiar with it until I mentioned it.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Ummm, hello moderator. You may be too crack-addled to click on the article, but then you shouldn't moderate. The post you marked as off-topic is *directly* ON-topic.
BB is very anti-Tom Cruise(missile). Why?
"Talented people know when they are running out of good ideas and can do something else with their lives."
once upon a time there was a mythical guy, mythically named "Seymour Cray",
Seymour had a very tough day job as Big Designer Guy of a very BIGG computer company.
Seymour designed a reasonably successful computer and then left to do his heart's desire....
as a way of embracing change and rejecting orthodoxy...this Seymour guy used to design and build hi-performance sailboats, when he was finished building a boat, he would sail it for a while and then....
....SET IT ON FIRE, BURN IT TO THE GROUND (SEA, actually)....
and START ALL OVER AGAIN...
maybe Cray, Brethed and Watterson know something the rest of us don't????
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Opus was named after a Kansas song. If you're too young to know who Kansas was, to hell with you.
"Magnum Opus", live version on _Two For the Show_ amazes.
Anyone else ever have the hots for Quiche Lorraine?
If you were agoraphobic, you'd be home now
Everyone knows that IBM has the patent on 1's and 0's...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, yeah, you think Peanuts was funnier than Bloom County. No doubt you think Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet were laugh riots too, and think Norman Rockwell was a great artist. I'll take biting sarcasm over stale 1950's nostalgia any day.
.. and i thought only birds everted their cloacha.
ick.
-'fester
Bloom County Zone
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
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...
And thanks for the new sig, Berke.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
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.
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
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!
Those are my three favorite comics, too! Pretty freaky. I never really liked Outland, but Bloom County was an unbelievable strip, IMHO unmatched by anything currently published.
I wonder how many other hackers are into these three? A cultural phenomenon, perhaps?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
- If that's all Breathed was saying, he's simply wrong. Schulz was not above making the terms of his syndicate contract public, and said more than once in interviews that his contract forbade the syndicate from ever hiring anyone else to write or draw Peanuts. Period.
- Breathed said not only that they could do this, but that they may as well have. This was the insult. Anyone who paid the least bit of attention to the last couple years of Peanuts should have noticed that Schulz was back near the top of his game. Mind you, I don't blame anyone for not reading the strip at that point; Schulz had indeed had quite a few dry years there. But such a person should not speak as if he knew what he was talking about.
------And the brethren went away edified.
... 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
Most pundits describe Bill Watterson as "reclusive" when they have occasion to mention him at all. What they really mean is that he values his privacy in much the same way as any other person in the world who just wants to do his job and go home to his quiet life at the end of the day. As a corollary, he has absolutely no use for the sort of pundit who would describe him as "reclusive".
He's still alive, still healthy, and looks a lot like Calvin's dad.
----
And the brethren went away edified.
Nah, Waterson was a piker. C&H only ran a bit over ten years. This dude did his strip for "a long-ass time!"
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
It is neither widely known nor accepted that anyone else "helped" with the art. The only area where Schulz accepted help was with the lettering, and that was done by his wife, I believe. Charles Schulz was no Jim Davis. Don't be an ignoramous.
------
And the brethren went away edified.
sacrilege!!!
-
In alphabetical order:
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
For a while back in the mid-90's I was at Amaze!nc, which produced the Bloom County screensaver. We would occasionally have Mr. Breathed come by the offices to work on the project. Not only were the screensavers hilarious (we even got sued for the one where Opus shoots down the flying toasters =), but Berke himself was a very nice guy, perfectly willing to take suggestions and laugh out loud with animation interns, just out of college with no corporate power of their own.
-Dug
I think I have a new .sig from this one: And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging
professional whiners.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Flabdabb -> Follow the links to the "everything2" nodes in the story for definitions.
... )
(In short -- Berke Breathed is a cartoonist who did two comics strips, Bloom County and Outland, that ran from 1980-1995 in US newspapers. It was originally picked up as a replacement for Doonesbury when it was on hiatus. Extremely funny stuff, the origin of "Bill the Cat", "Opus the Penguin", etc
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Nothing beats The Onion when it comes to horoscopes, Heres Berkeley's:
:)
Virgo: (Aug. 23--Sept. 22)
It will occur to you that no one in the phone book has a realistic-sounding name. Change them all, if possible.
However mine is better
Aries: (March 21--April 19)
If you put too much gasoline on the bandanna over your face, you'll get sick. Not enough and you'll be able to smell the corpses. Strike a balance.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
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
This got me thinking about my other favorite reclusive former comic strip writer. I looked around and found an interview (allegedly the only one he ever gave); and a shorter, more recent article. The second one is kind of sad . . . it's too bad that the fame of the strip brought him so much unhappiness.
"fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy"
His illustrations are amazing, and from the archive of censored strips [and his earlier work during college, 'University **2' [that's 'squared' for you non-fortran programmers]], he does try to push the limit of what's allowed in comics. Mostly through his frat-boy like characters.
The main thing that stands out is his drawing, as it's simply breathtaking. I don't know how well it stands up to standard newsprint, but they also release a comic book sized issue every few weeks with about 6 weeks of collected work.
The story lines, although sometimes go off on a complete tangent [There's a definate influence of British Comedy in there...I think there may have even been a few direct references], but I've yet to see one that wasn't funny.
For samples, check out their web page:And don't forget to check out the Uncensored section.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
We should have rallied around Opus. Marketing AND a penguin, rolled into one.
Hell, the strip even has a real hacker/scientist in it. Tell me that you haven't be thinking this.
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 ;)
The one machine i wished someone would make...
I miss Calvin and Hobbes, too (and Mom and Dad and Suzie). Maybe more than I miss Charlie Brown and Snoopy. But I still miss Snoopy. Goodby, Charlie, and fairwell.
P.S. I don't really miss Milo and Opus much, and I certainly don't miss Steve Dallas or Bill the Cat.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Now see, my first thoughts were of Babs Bunny.
"Fritz the Cat" or Mr. Natural was not exactly everyone's cup of tea, for example. But Crumb has quite a cult following. Zippy is in the same general ballpark.
If you don't like it, don't feel bad. It's just not something you can explain, I guess.
cya
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
You're not far off there. I read Zippy for quite some time, mainly because the artwork was so off the wall. I never found it funny, until one day, it just somehow clicked -- and from then on it was hilarious. Not unlike the way I watched "Wild at Heart" from David Lynch, didn't laugh at all through the whole movie, then as the credits rolled, suddenly "got it" and busted a lung laughing so hard. It's just quirky, edgy humor.
The humor isn't as accessible as Calvin & Hobbes or Peanuts, but then again it didn't try to be. Zippy grew out of a totally different background -- underground comics and so on -- and never really went mainstream, which is why I think I grew to like it.
Breathed was also basically Trudeau on speed -- same kind of humor, but even more on the edge, always dancing on the line of good taste, and even more cynical than Doonesbury. But he was still fundamentally mainstream in his style of humor, even if he offended the religious right a lot. Zippy, on the other hand, is more of a coffee-house artist kind of thing...
cya
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
What about the Far Side?
He even calls for volunteers to help with his site!
Too late, looks like someone already helped him. His site looks terrific IMO.
Hammer of Truth
When a favorite author or artist decides they've had enough and the fan has to find something new to fill the gap. "That's life, deal", doesn't come close to getting a fan past that wall. Larson, DNA, Breathed, Watterson, and many others drop out when they have their fans peak interest and call it "leaving while it's still fresh" or some crap like that. As tough as these people have been on themselves, they are and have been their own worst critics. I don't think I've ever seen a Bloom County strip I didn't like. At least I have the books and can fish them out once every couple years, to read and reminice. It was a great time to be a kid.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Perhaps you are unaware that Elvis is considered by many people Berke's age, entirely without irony, the King of Rock and Roll, having invented and defined the entire genre.
As for the image of the fat Elvis in Las Vegas... he had his prime, certainly, but since he references in the interview how good Schultz was at the end, I don't think the Elvis comment was supposed to be a perfect analogy, just a comment that Schultz was the King of the genre.
And yes, Peanuts in the 80s sucked. But so did almost all drawn art in America, animated, comic book and cartoon. Part of the reason the likes of Opus, Calvin and cows with granny glasses stand out is because they were greats among the really really lousy.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Those are my three favorite comics, too! Pretty freaky. ... I wonder how many other hackers are into these three? A cultural phenomenon, perhaps?
Errr, it might be a cultural phenomenon, except for the small fact that "Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbes, & Bloom County" are/were three of THE most popular comic strips in the United States.
It's like saying, "Oh, you like Coca-Cola, Star Wars, and having sex, too?! So do I! Hack3rs ru13!"
"And like that