Berkeley Breathed Ends His Opus



Go here for the final printed comic of Berkeley Breathed's Opus comic that ran yesterday in various papers. Go here to see the final panel on-line, as arranged by Breathed in a nice bit of PR and a thematic nod to where the strips are going. If it's not clear what I'm talking about, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist ended his Sundays-only strip after only a few years, effectively ending a major newspaper strip cartooning career that stretches back through another Sunday-only strip, Outland, through one of the foundational strips of the 1980s, Bloom County, all the way back to one of the most important college-newspaper strips of all time, Academia Waltz. Here's his final letter on the subject, where we find out the character is dreaming, not dead.

I greatly enjoyed this interview with Breathed, where he speaks in his usual forthright fashion about where he feels the comics page is going -- straight into the dustbin of history. I disagree with him that it's inevitable, but if comic strips don't find a better delivery method, one that uniquely bolstered and served the on-line iterations of newspapers, I think there's actually a risk they could begin a decade or so long death rattle, I really do.
 
posted 7:20 am PST | Permalink
 

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