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.
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 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.
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.
The digital world has allowed me a connection with my reader that I'd never had before. I didn't meet the people who read my material. The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that'd done them for a living. And I didn't have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn't have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
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.
It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.