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BERKELEY BREATHED

Berkeley Breathed is the creator of several inglorious firsts in cartooning.

He was the first to quit an enormously popular comic strip. He was the first to come back with another after ending the original (which had nothing wrong with it in the first place). And he was the first to retire his second strip, declaring he was done with newspaper comics once and for all, only to start all over again.

But what would you expect of a cartoonist who, during his first newspaper gig, at the Austin American-Statesman, got readers so riled they hanged his editor in effigy, a toy arrow pinning Breathed’s offending editorial cartoon to the effigy’s head?

Despite the inauspicious start, Breathed created his first comic strip, The Academia Waltz, for his college newspaper. After graduating from the University of Texas, he began submitting it to the syndicates. And was rejected.

Breathed's work eventually came to the attention of the Washington Post's syndicate division after a college-age mailroom employee -- on vacation from the University of Texas -- forwarded some of the cartoons to editors upstairs. The Washington Post Writers Group signed him in short order.

Debuting in 1980, Bloom County quickly became a cult favorite and soon gained wide popularity. Nine years, 1,300 client papers, sales
of six million books, numerous licensed products and a Pulitzer Prize later, Breathed quit.

But his retirement lasted only four weeks before he started cartooning again, this time with a strip appearing only on Sundays. Outland began in 1989 with new characters paired with Bloom County’s beloved Opus the penguin. Slowly, many from the Bloom County cast reassembled, and Outland had a six-year run in more than 300 papers.

Then in 1995, a second successful strip on his hands, he quit again.

This second time he stayed away nearly a decade, authoring five picture books in eight years. After completing Flawed Dogs, published in 2003, he realized two things. First, comic strips had evolved. You could now come darned close to painting them--no more flat, cookie-cutter color. Second, he still had some things to say. "It was painful to sit through the Iraq war without a public voice," he explained

So in November 2003, Breathed brought back Opus, and he is slowly drawing out other old Bloom County and Outland favorites, including Bill the cat and the man readers love to hate, Steve Dallas. Many a surprise is in store for old and new fans alike.

In late 2004, Little, Brown and Company published OPUS: 25 Years of His Sunday Best, featuring Breathed’s favorite Bloom County, Outland and Opus Sunday comic strips. Breathed’s other books include 12 strip compilations and six picture books. He is also a screenwriter and director and produced A Wish for Wings That Work, a holiday TV special (based on the book of the same name) in 1992. An Opus movie is currently in development. Breathed lives in California with his wife and two children.

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