Berkeley Breathed - Cartooning Career

Cartooning Career

Breathed became published first when he was hired part-time by the Austin American-Statesman to draw editorial cartoons for the newspaper. This job was short-lived; he was dismissed shortly after one of his cartoons caused outrage. His first comic strip published regularly was The Academia Waltz, which appeared in the Daily Texan, in 1978 while he was a student at the University of Texas. While at the University of Texas, Breathed self-published two collections of The Academia Waltz, using the profits to pay his tuition. The comic strip attracted the notice of 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 paraplegic Vietnam war veteran Cutter John. In the beginning, the strip's style was so similar to that of another popular strip, Doonesbury, that Doonesbury's creator Garry Trudeau wrote to Breathed several times to indicate their similarities. Breathed has acknowledged that he borrowed liberally from Doonesbury during his early career. In the Outland collection, One Last Little Peek, Breathed even put an early Bloom County side-by-side with the Doonesbury comic strip from which it obviously took its idea.

Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning during 1987. The strip eventually appeared in over 1,200 newspapers around the world until Berkeley retired the daily strip in 1989, 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".

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.

Eight years later, Breathed began the comic strip Opus, a Sunday-only strip featuring Opus the Penguin, who was one of the main characters of Bloom County.

Several newspapers chose not to run the August 26, 2007, Opus cartoon because it might offend Muslims.

On October 6, 2008, Breathed announced plans to discontinue all work on comic strips with the final Opus strip to run on November 2, 2008. Breathed plans to focus on writing children's books. Breathed explained that he felt that the United States was going to face "tough times", and that he wanted to end the saga of his most memorable character "on a lighter note".

The last Opus comic strip appeared on schedule, but in what may be a comic first the final panel required an online link. The final panel the strip showed Opus sleeping peacefully in the bed depicted in the classic children's book, Goodnight Moon. This panel was available only online, and the Humane Society page that displayed it no longer exists.

Breathed said that he had no regrets in leaving political cartooning, as he believes the atmosphere became too bitter for him to make quality cartoons.