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
Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
I hate smoothies. Because they won't offer Firestone IPA beer as an ingredient.
My kids hear me behind my door, giggling like an idiot, and they roll their eyes at the blatant indignity of it all.
It's not terribly dignified to have anyone seeing one laugh at one's own material.
I don't get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.
I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.
Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family...
A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!
The universe throws us some obvious little pitches sometimes, and we need to be awake enough not to let them slip by.
That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.
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.
The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.
Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.