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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! ;)"
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.
You can find an interview from last February here.
More important than your career or your pet peeve -- your family.
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
Bloom County Zone
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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...
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.
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 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.
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And the brethren went away edified.
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.
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"
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