I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
BERKELEY BREATHEDThe 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDThe 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI happen to think nearly everybody – especially those one might find in the odd issue of ‘People’ magazine, including me – is frightfully boring, especially me. And Tom Cruise. Tom and I are alike in only this way.
BERKELEY BREATHEDIt’s not terribly dignified to have anyone seeing one laugh at one’s own material.
BERKELEY BREATHEDSteve 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDDear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us…
BERKELEY BREATHEDThat’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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDKeep 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child – which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI 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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI paint digitally now. A pity, in some ways, as the biggest price one pays is that you no longer have a finished piece of physical art to hang on a wall. I miss that terribly.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI don’t get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.
BERKELEY BREATHED