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He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.

Berkeley Breathed

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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Comfort Cynical Heart
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Connection Fans Living Material Relationship Work
Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Attention College Influence
I don’t get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Digital Revolution Fans Mail
Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Elude Genius Irony
Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he’s a professional whiner in the newspaper.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Heart Libertarian Politics
I’ll confess right here that I secretly wish I’d have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Adventure Boys Imagination
I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Cards Guy Holiday
Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Deconstruction Jokes Tears
I 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 BREATHED

Children Goodbye Stupid
I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.
BERKELEY BREATHED

America College Thinking
I 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 BREATHED

Issues People Thinking
He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Dying Pages Want
I 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 BREATHED

Art Missing Wall
It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don’t pop into mind when one sees one.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Challenges Digital Mind
Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Abridged Lives Our Paperback
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Anger Hands Heart
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Allow Artist Connection People
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Paper Writing Years
Harry Potter’ shouldn’t be children’s first experience with suspense and plot turns.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Children Plot Suspense
I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Bunch Libertarian Subtext
Keep 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 BREATHED

Mind Portions Readership
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Abstraction Income Wanted
I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas’ Daily Texan.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Country News Photographer
A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!
BERKELEY BREATHED

Evolution Mind
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Daughter Mom Mother
And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Bunnies Granny Jammies

He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.

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He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.

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