From the Kansas City Star, by way of Chromewaves

Camera-shy Berkeley Breathed marks 25 years of Opus… even though the strip is only 24
By STEVE GREENLEE
The Boston Globe
Mon, Nov. 08, 2004

It seems like only yesterday Opus was putting cucumbers in his nose and Spam on his head. But Berkeley Breathed’s strip “Bloom County,” about a transplanted penguin and his motley crew, made its debut in December 1980. This year, the cartoonist figured, what the heck, let’s get a jump on the 25th anniversary.

Little, Brown & Co. has just published Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best, a lavish collection of Breathed’s favorite strips from the popular “Bloom County” and the two Sunday-only comics that succeeded it, “Outland” and “Opus,” the latter of which now runs in 185 papers (including The Kansas City Star).

Breathed, who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987, lives in Southern California with his wife and their two young children. The 47-year-old illustrator/satirist does not do many interviews but consented to this tongue-in-cheek interview by e-mail that covered just about everything.

Q: So how old is 25 in penguin years?

A: I dunno. Ask Madonna how old 46 is in Idiot Diva years.

Didn’t “Bloom County” start in 1980? How do you figure 25 years? Sounds like fuzzy math.

Buy the book Jan. 1 of next year if these things bother you, and sleep at night with a safe 25 years. Listen, (President) Bush has raised the bar with getting comfortable with fuzzy everything. On his terms, I should have been able to call this the Centennial Opus Collection.

What’s with doing the strip, then retiring, then doing the strip, then retiring, doing the strip.… Are you a flip-flopper?

Did “Bloom County” look like it was affectionate toward anything resembling Conventional Practices? I had (angered) my loyal readers and editors in every way imaginable through vulgar and objectionable comic material, and this seemed the Last Great Mountain to Climb. It worked. Jim Davis (“Garfield”) has the right idea: For God’s sake, never, never stop.

Why did you start doing a strip again?

I left in 1995, when the world had gotten finally, safely boring. It was a lot of work helping this happen. Larson, Watterson and I all packed up our stuff and went home, happy that it was Mission Accomplished. (Gary Larson created “The Far Side”; Bill Watterson, “Calvin and Hobbes.”) We all know where that attitude can get you.

How come only on Sundays?

My children, recently purchased, need a Monkey Monster to chase them during most of the week that used to go toward drawing cats dressed as Gene Simmons, vomiting. A Sunday-only strip is … not actually a comic strip in most any sense. Four cartoons a month rather than 30 is something else. Something less, I fear. But I hope that it’s more than nothing. This is exactly how our government rationalized the current war. The wrong war is better than, well, no war. Bush told me this in an e-mail.

You must have a lot of spare time, compared to, say, Aaron McGruder (creator of “The Boondocks”)?

Mr. McGruder is actually a cabal of leftist professors in Berkeley, Calif., working with a hired artist. “Aaron McGruder” is the name of their cat. I’m sorry to have to break this into the national media here today.

What do you think of “The Boondocks” anyway?

I think he’s almost ruined the two loveliest words in cartooning for the rest of us: Dick Cheney.

When Opus came along, it was basically just him and Chilly Willy. Now there’s the Linux penguin, the Bud Ice penguins, Feathers McGraw, Wheezy from “Toy Story 2.” … Any same-species rivalry?

Dreamworks has “Madagascar” coming, with a band of criminal penguins. Sony has a movie coming about surfing penguins. Warner has a singing-penguin flick coming. We’ll be behind them all with our own Opus movie at Dimension/Disney. We let them go first largely because we’re polite.

What’s the oddest thing you can tell me about penguins?

They’re genuinely multicultural. As opposed to us, who are fraudulently multicultural. They sit around in mixed company, happy to have a gentoo next to their nest as a rockhopper. They don’t blather on incessantly about how neat this is. And they don’t quietly head back to work pooping on the ice and go home where they return to hanging out exclusively with birds just like themselves.

But give them time.

What ever happened to Steve Dallas? The last we saw of him, I think, he was out of the closet, heading somewhere on a bus with his partner. He wasn’t headed to Massachusetts, by any chance?

Reappears magically, enthusiastically heterosexual again, on Nov. 21. He went through one of those homosexual cleansing processes that the Christian right talks about. Seems to have worked. But then, someone should see where he goes at night.

Does “Bloom County”/“Outland”/“Opus” have an overarching message or moral?

“Quit while you’re ahead. Then return. Repeat.”

Does Opus have a sort of doppelganger in classic literature? Holden Caulfield? Odysseus?

R2-D2. Think about it. You said “classic,” didn’t you?

Is Opus ever going to settle down, get married, raise a family, buy a Nissan Murano, etc.?

Have you tried? If so, try with oily feathers but no legs, neck or sex life whatsoever, plus a nose that pulls you over into your pea soup. It’s complicated.

How did you choose the strips you’d include in the new book?

I remember virtually none of them. True, if you saw how most of them were actually executed (3 a.m., in a fog of narcotics and caffeine, slapping myself in the face with a ruler to stay awake), you will believe this normally unbelievable claim. I carefully avoided reading for two simple reasons: I hated how they looked on newsprint and appearing smaller than the labels on spice jars. And I feared reading a strip that made sense only to a mind muddled by stimulants and Ho Hos. So I returned to them with wholly ignorant fresh eyes. I chose the ones that I cackled at. My editor did the same, and we compared notes, agreeing that we would run only the ones we both agreed on. I shot him and sent my choices to the publisher.

What’s your favorite strip in the book?

Changes with the weather. I am oddly, eternally self-entertained with the frame that serves as the book’s endpapers. This makes me laugh no matter what stage of exhaustion I find myself in. My family is deeply embarrassed that I am amused at my own work. Try getting (“Doonesbury” creator Garry) Trudeau to admit to giggling at one of his drawings. No, I’m not describing. Get the book. This is called a tease.

You left out my favorite strip, the one where the politician calls the newspaper office to complain that they’ve misspelled his name as “Potato Head.” Can you put it in “Opus at 50”?

No, but that’s very funny. I wrote that? Do you think your readers would find it acceptable for me to steal my own forgotten material?

Why isn’t the collection coming out on Penguin Books?

Haven’t I always avoided the easy jokes?