Berkeley Breathed
Berkeley Breathed
Guy Berkeley "Berke" Breathedis an American cartoonist, children's book author/illustrator, director and screenwriter, best known for Bloom County, a 1980s cartoon-comic strip and more recent Internet cartoons that reflect sociopolitical issues as understood by fanciful charactersand through humorous analogies. Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth21 June 1957
CityEncino, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I don't get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.
Steve Dallas...a frat-boy lawyer who I knew in school. He's never written me. I suspect he was shot by an annoyed girlfriend, which has saved me many legal fees.
My post-child period resulted in one instant change: I write shorter books for kids.
Keep in mind that in 1985, I had a potential readership of over 50 million Americans. At that time, a good portion of those were under 30.
My kids hear me behind my door, giggling like an idiot, and they roll their eyes at the blatant indignity of it all.
It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.
If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize.
I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas' Daily Texan.
It's not terribly dignified to have anyone seeing one laugh at one's own material.
I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.
If I could have drawn a cat yelling for lasagna every day for 15 years and have them pay me $30 million to do so, I would have.
I knew 'Mars Needs Moms! ' would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually.
Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.