NPR did a story in the return of Berkeley Breathed and “Bloom County“.
After re-reading a letter from To Kill a Mocking Bird author Harper Lee, asking him not to retire the strip, he renewed his interest in the strip.
BREATHED: When I pulled that out – I hadn’t seen it for 25 years. And I choked up, and I thought about the preposterously ironic impossibility of my literary heroine from my childhood demanding that I not kill one of her fictional heroes. The universe throws us some obvious little pitches sometimes, and we need to be awake enough not to let them slip by. So that night I found the blank four frames of “Bloom County” from years before in my files, and I sat down to draw the first one in 30 years. And I posted it on Facebook in sort of a what-the-hell moment, and that’s exactly how much careful reason sober forethought went into the whole thing. And then it exploded after that.
So where is this so-called letter? On the NPR audio, Breathed mentions that it’s on his Facebook page… yet his page is conveniently “unavailable”. I hope this isn’t some sleazy PR hoax.
Maybe Bill the Cat ate it…or wrote it
He does tell a whopper about speaking at the AAEC convention the year he won the Pulitzer. As I wrote in a fairly well-shared Facebook post, I was there and, contrary to Breathed’s story about his talk being boycotted by all but a few “college cartoonists” due to the member’s supposed anger at his having gotten the award(anger that apparently didn’t prevent him from being invited to give the keynote speech to begin with), he in fact spoke to a packed house and was mobbed for autographs afterward. So, yeah, I’d be dubious about ANYTHING he says. And I say that as a fan. Though I didn’t myself wait in line for an autograph.
Love seeing Bloom County appear in my Facebook feed every morning. Old friends.