Berkeley Breathed is Back!

I just found out that Berkeley Breathed is back—on Facebook. He’s the creator of Bloom County, graced by the character of Opus, an adorable, guileless, and brilliant penguin. The daily comic strip was syndicated in 1,200 newspapers from 1980 to 1989, then morphed into a Sunday only Opus in 2003, which ran until 2008. Breathed then retired Opus and friends, although I’m pleased to hear Breathed himself had plenty of work, just not in a newspaper in Bloom County.

This is the comic I’ve had on my refrigerator since 2007 from the Opus strip (click to enlarge):

After I “liked” Bloom County on Facebook and got to see all his recent strips (and all the wonderful one liner comments full of puns and quips that accompany each posting) I also found out Breathed was interviewed on Fresh Air, and here I found out a lot of other stuff. One, that he had been miserable when he originally wrote his weekly comic strip (he never said why) but that now he was having the time of his life and couldn’t wait to get up each morning to write his daily strip. Two, that he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons and was shunned by all the other editorial cartoon writers who appeared on the editorial pages of our newspapers, not on the comics page.

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But for me, the most interesting thing he said was about how age had mellowed him in terms of the pointedness of his ridicule of certain people. He used the singer Barry Manilow as an example. Manilow (“Can’t Smile Without You”) is the ‘70s singer in the same category as Neil Diamond, who was immortalized in the movie “What About Bob?” when Bill Murray, playing the barely functional neurotic Bob, reveals that it was he who left his wife, not she who left him, because she liked Neil Diamond.

Back to Barry Manilow. Breathed pilloried Manilow, along with many other deserving public figures like Donald Trump, but years later, he’s out on the street in Santa Barbara (I think that’s where they were) with his son and he sees Manilow walking down the street. He stops, and with his son in tow, goes up to the singer and Manilow tells Breathed’s son that his dad is one of the best cartoonists of all time and Breathed tells his son that Manilow is one of the best pop singers of all time.

This made me stop and think about how I feel about pissing people off now that I’m older. And I’ve pissed a lot of people off over the years even though I’m fairly well known as a nice person (just ask anyone I haven’t pissed off). Like Breathed, it’s my job to investigate, and in the process make people uncomfortable (hopefully), although I wish it were with the genius of his humor rather than the journalistic sarcasm I often employ.

Breathed’s remorse seems to emanate from life experience: maybe it’s not as important as you once thought that you get everyone to acknowledge the schmaltz of Barry Manilow’s pop. Did he deserve being the foil of Breathed’s rapier wit? In the larger scheme of things, probably not.

Mine seems to emanate from the fact that just has my skin has literally thinned with age so too has it thinned in the metaphorical sense: I’m not as stoic about criticism as I used to be. Sometimes I don’t interpret a take down as proof of a job well done but as an arrow that stings. Actually, maybe that’s where Breathed’s comes from as well. If he and I are capable of feeling the pain, maybe all those other folks out there are as well. Does that mean we’re less judgmental? Not really; in fact I’m more judgmental than ever as my half empty jar continues to diminish in these days of absurdity. It just means that I’ve lived long enough to know that life is tough for everyone, even the ones I think are idiots.

While I haven’t reconciled with many who became the enemy, I’ve walked past the animosity with some to a space that allows a little wiggle room for working together on whatever we can. And now that La Jicarita is mostly retired, I probably won’t be involved in nearly as many situations where the possibility of making enemies is endless. There is the fact that the book I wrote about all the enemies I made has just been released—Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities—but it’s old hat: anything I say about anybody in the book was already said to their faces—or in La Jicarita—at some time or another.

I’ll watch Bloom County closely, however, to see if Breathed treats “the Donald” et al. a little more kindly, even though the times, if anything, scream out for pillage. Fortunately, he hasn’t lost a beat when dealing with the representational: see the woman in the crocheted halter top. So I don’t think we need worry that a little bit of kindness here and there will encumber the fun. Berkeley Breathed is indeed back.