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Berkeley Breathed

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Guy Berkeley ("Berke") Breathed (last name rhymes with "method") (born June 21, 1957) is an American cartoonist, children's book author/illustrator, director and screenwriter, best known for Bloom County, a 1980s cartoon-comic strip which dealt with socio-political issues, as seen through the eyes of highly exaggerated characters (e.g. Bill the Cat and Opus the Penguin) and humorous analogies.

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[edit] Early life

Breathed was born on June 21, 1957, in Encino, California. He went to Westchester High School (now Westchester Academy for International Studies) in Houston, Texas, where he was a cheerleader who went by the name of Guy, his actual first name. It was here that Breathed began drawing cartoons and he occasionally submitted them to a local newspaper. He went on to the University of Texas at Austin and became a photographer and writer for the campus newspaper The Daily Texan.

[edit] Cartooning career

His first regularly published strip was The Academia Waltz, which appeared in the Daily Texan in 1978. The strip attracted the notice of the editors of the Washington Post who recruited him to do a nationally syndicated strip. On December 8, 1980, Bloom County made its debut, and featured some of the characters from Academia Waltz, including former frat-boy Steve Dallas and the paralyzed Vietnam war veteran Cutter John. In the beginning, the strip's style was so close to that of another popular strip, Doonesbury, that creator Garry Trudeau wrote to Breathed several times to point out the similarities. Breathed has acknowledged that he borrowed liberally from Doonesbury in his early career. In the Outland collection One Last Little Peek, Breathed even puts an early Bloom County side-by-side with the Doonesbury from which it obviously took its idea. Trudeau has also criticized Breathed for copying other cartoonists' works.

Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. The strip eventually appeared in over 1,200 newspapers around the world until Berkeley retired the daily strip in 1989.

He replaced this strip with the surreal Sunday-only cartoon Outland in 1989, which reused some of the Bloom County characters, including Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat. He ended Outland in 1995, stating that he wanted to terminate the strip while it was still popular. At that time, he said, "A good comic strip is no more eternal than a ripe melon. The ugly truth is that in most cases, comics age less gracefully than their creators."

Eight years later, Breathed began producing the comic strip Opus, a Sunday-only strip featuring Opus the Penguin, who was one of the central characters in Bloom County. He colors the cartoon himself with Adobe Photoshop, claiming that the advances in technology since 1990 have created an opportunity for "something that looks cool on a comic page."

[edit] Other works

In addition to his syndicated cartoon work, which has produced eleven best-selling cartoon collections, he has also produced five children's books, two of which, A Wish for Wings That Work and Edwurd Fudwupper Fibbed Big were made into animated works. Since 1992, he has designed a greeting card and gift ensemble collection for American Greetings, featuring the Bloom County characters Opus, Bill the Cat and Milquetoast the cockroach. Breathed's writing has also been featured in numerous publications including Life, Boating, and Travel and Leisure. He was also responsible for the cartoon art in the film Secondhand Lions, which featured a cartoon named Walter and Jasmine. The comics he made for Secondhand Lions appeared in Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best, in which Breathed called them "the comic strip that never was".

Breathed has been a supporter of the animal rights group PETA and illustrated the cover of their "Compassionate Cookbook", as well as T-shirts and other merchandise for them.

[edit] Personal life

[citation needed]In 1986, Berkeley broke his back in an ultralight-plane crash and almost lost his right arm to a boat propeller.

Breathed and his family live in Southern California. He is reportedly a very private person, and although he has given interviews to on-line magazines such as The Onion and Salon, he has rarely given face-to-face or telephone interviews and resists talking about himself. He and his wife support animal rights and his book Flawed Dogs: The Year End Leftovers at the Piddleton 'Last Chance' Dog Pound encourages animal adoption.

[edit] Books

  • Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, August 1987. (ISBN 0-316-10729-8) Contained a flexi-disc featuring two songs by Billy and the Boingers.
  • Red Ranger Came Calling
  • The Last Basselope: One Ferocious Story
  • Goodnight Opus
  • A Wish for Wings That Work: An Opus Christmas Story
  • Edwurd Fudwupper Fibbed Big, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
  • Flawed Dogs: The Year End Leftovers at the Piddleton "Last Chance" Dog Pound
  • Opus, 25 Years. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2003 ISBN 0-316-15994-8.

[edit] Awards

  • Breathed won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987.

[edit] References

  • Strickler, Dave. Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists, 1924-1995: The Complete Index. Cambria, CA: Comics Access, 1995. ISBN 0-9700077-0-1.

[edit] External links

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