Narrative Therapy: The Art of Berkeley Breathed

A common generalization is that comics are for kids. Sure, they can be, but the most successful strips entertain all ages while inhabiting a space largely known as a safe zone for children: the Sunday newspaper comics page. Classic strips like Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side and Doonesbury come to mind, as do contemporary strips like The Knight Life or Liberty Meadows, but perhaps no comic strip personified that four-color space more so than Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County and its sequel strips Outland and Opus (1980-2000). The adventures of Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat may have sated a kid’s thirst for funny-looking cartoon animals, but adults led a vicarious life through characters like the one-time “Mister America,” Steve Dallas.

Given his success on the Sunday comics page, it should be no surprise that Berkeley Breathed found a second career as an author and illustrator of several well-received children’s books. Breathed’s illustrated books deal with situations not often found in children’s literature, like losing a parent (in 2007’s Mars Needs Moms! the main character’s mother sacrifices herself to save her son, though the publisher balked at the pivotal scene – “I found a new publisher [and] Disney will release the movie [Christmas 2010],” says Breathed). His newest, Flawed Dogs The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster, is set for release in September and is already making waves as it asks readers to contemplate animal abuse amid the ode to the love shared between a girl and her dachshund.

Filter traded missives with the busy Breathed, who graciously opined on his start in comics, the “new preciousness” in children’s literature and his favorite Bloom County storyline - just in time for IDW Publishing’s fall release of the first volume of The Bloom County Library, a definitive collection of the strip for, as Breathed says, “the seriously whacked fan boys.” Needless to say, we’ve placed our order.

How did you first get interested in comics and art?
Berkeley Breathed: By being fired, literally, in every other professional area of my college newspaper. I loved newspapers. I just hadn’t been blessed with any particular respect for facts. I tried a comic strip as a final desperate attempt to find my place in journalism. The comic section is like the attic where journalists stick their crazy aunt. 

How did you realize you were going to become a cartoonist?
The writing on the cartoon wall became apparent after I put myself through the University of Texas on the money I made self-publishing collections of college cartoons. I found it astonishing that a living could be made from it.  On the other hand, 30 years later, if my son came to me and announced his intention of becoming a cartoonist, I would lock him in the attic, come to think of it.

What Bloom County storyline has the fondest place in your memory?
After I broke my back in a flying accident, I replayed it through Steve Dallas’s sex life. Great fun. Hugely invasive of my privacy and I would have sued myself if I could have gotten away with it.

What other forms of visual art interest you?
Movies, of course. Great pictorial painters of the 19th century. The carvings on any Egyptian tomb. If there’s no story in the art, I’m not much interested. Narrative and story is what the world seeks in everything. Which is why modern art is viewed as being irrelevant and silly. They left the story out.

How did you come to the process of creating artwork digitally? How has it changed the way you work?
It has thoughtfully absolved me of even the most minimal responsibilities as a painter: I don’t have to learn to mix paint. [It] takes a lifetime, often, to really learn to do this. I’d love to have spent the time, but I have a train to catch, metaphorically speaking. On a pragmatic level, digitally creating art has simply allowed me to accelerate my output. This is good in a world of mortal limits. 

Do you feel most children’s books are dumbed down for today’s youth?
I’ve thought much about this. I am rather mystified, even while I’m fascinated at the new preciousness that keeps getting thrown at kids now. All I conclude is that there’s a whole lot of projection going on with adults, trying desperately, and naively, to re-imagine a simple past that simply never existed.  I wonder if the folks who find my themes too challenging -whether it’s a parent’s willingness to die for her children or a dog’s torment of facing a fight - I wonder if they’ve actually talked to kids. Or, if they’ve stopped trying to imagine their own childhoods as different than they were.  Kids’ imaginations go to dark places. As long as you return them to the light, I’ve never found a downside to the visit. In fact, it’s that return that is so narratively therapeutic. J.K. Rowling figured this out in spades.  

How does your own family influence your work?
The novel Flawed Dogs came about from my relationship with our family dogs - and our frequent forays into the local dog shelters. Mars Needs Moms! popped into my head, whole and in three acts, after I heard my 4-year-old son scream something truly stunning at his mother during a very ugly fit. I’ve learned not to look too far from home for the most instructive writing themes. Experience teaches this to every writer. Bloom County is getting the “definitive edition” treatment this October.

What’s been your part in the process of re-collecting these strips?
I told them they could do it if they absolutely assured me that I wouldn’t have to do anything; that I wouldn’t be drawn into the commentary along the margins of the pages; that I wouldn’t be forced to go back mentally to 1985 and remember that I used to dress like Don Johnson and listen to the Pet Shop Boys and wear a mullet while drawing all those strips at 4 a.m. They lied. The horrors of the ‘80s came flooding back. The readers will get dizzy like I did as their childhood cultural traumas all get resurrected by Steve Dallas and Binkley and Opus. Truly, I apologize for this. F