Berkeley Breathed
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Berkeley ("Berke") Breathed (last name rhymes with "method") is a 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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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, according to an Austin American-Statesman article, he was a cheerleader who went by the name of Guy. 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 and became a photographer and writer for the campus newspaper The Daily Texan, where he sometimes enhanced photos and made up stories in order to make his contributions more compelling.
Cartooning career
His first regularly published strip was Academia Waltz which appeared in the Daily Texan in 1978. The strip attracted 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 Breathed several times to point out the similarities.
Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. The strip eventually appeared in over 1200 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."
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.
Personal life
In 1986, Berkeley broke his back in an ultralight-plane crash and almost lost his right arm to a boat propeller.
Breathed and his wife, wildlife photographer and psychotherapist, Jody Boyman, and their daughter Sophie 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.
Books
- Breathed, Berkeley (2003). Opus, 25 Years. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-15994-8.
External links
- berkeleybreathed.com (http://www.berkeleybreathed.com/)
- The Miata Opus Tribute Site (http://www.opusmiata.designlunacy.com/opus_name.html)
- Opus Pocus (http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/living/7420625.htm?1c) from The Star-Telegram
- Berkley Breathed Interview (http://avclub.theonion.com/feature/index.php?issue=3728&f=1) by Tasha Robinson for The Onion A.V. Club
- Another interview (http://www.pvponline.com/rants_breathed.php3) by Scott Kurtz of PvPde:Berkeley Breathed