Over In Out(Land) -- The Reluctant Creator Of `Bloom County' And `Outland' Tells Why He Is Calling It Quits

Over the past few weeks, the characters of "Outland" have one by one been taking their curtain calls. Oliver Wendell Jones left with his bags packed for the Info Superhighway. Steve Dallas, fresh out of the closet, was last seen on a Las Vegas-bound bus with his new partner. This Sunday, with the strip's last installment, Berkeley Breathed also says goodbye to the funny pages.

When "Bloom County" first appeared on the comics pages 15 years ago, Breathed's sly take on politics and pop culture quickly earned his strip a large following. His characters, Opus the Penquin and Bill the Cat, became household names. In 1989, with a Pulitzer Prize in cartooning under his belt, and his work appearing in 1,300 papers around the country, Breathed called it quits. But later that year, he started "Outland," a Sunday-only strip that featured many of the same characters. This time, however, Breathed says he's quitting for good.

Recently, in an interview at a downtown restaurant, Breathed, who lives in the Seattle area, talked about the past and future of comics pages and about his often ambivalent feelings about his career and success.

Seattle Times: How long have you been thinking of quitting?

Berkeley Breathed: I made the decision a few weeks before the announcement in January. I've done this before when I ended "Bloom County," and a lot of people are assuming that I'm just going to come back with another strip. I didn't anticipate that. I should have announced that I was ending my cartooning career.

That was a big decision. I've been thinking about that for years. I was going to do that when I stopped doing "Bloom County," and I was talked into coming back and doing a Sunday strip. I think they convinced me I was going to starve unless I did something and they were successful in doing that. But five years is long enough for "Outland" and as someone said in an editorial someone sent me a couple of weeks ago: "Breathed had the good sense to leave the party while he was still having fun."

ST: Are you still having fun?

BB: I'm still enjoying cartoons. I'm missing it right now. The opportunity for having a national mouthpiece is granted to few people and I never took it for granted. There's a great deal of satisfaction in that. It's almost like therapy to talk about the things that mean a lot to you, and to have a huge number of people listen and be entertained.

I read the paper today and my instinct was to start jotting notes down. I almost reached for a pencil and I thought, "Whoa!!! I've been shut up."

ST: So why quit now?

BB: For a hundred reasons. Age. I'm almost 40. I'll be 38 in June. It's a horrible cliche but it's true. You start looking back and at what you're going to do. You start measuring time and I've spent a lot of wasted time on activities that didn't progress my career in directions I would have liked, and now's the time to do it.

ST: Like what?

BB: Well, the only thing I feel I'm really decent at is telling stories. I don't think I'm a particularly good cartoonist. Part of cartooning is telling stories, but the irony is that cartooning is actually a poor way of telling a story. It's convoluted, painfully slow. So I'm looking for ways of telling the story much more efficiently, and film productions is one of them.

ST: Animated? Feature length?

BB: Everything, and we're in negotiations now so I really can't talk about what's in the offing.

ST: You don't seem to have a very optimistic opinion of the future of comics pages.

BB: Comic strips were the first unifying and universal entertainment medium in this country. Comic strips existed before there was radio and there were comic strip characters that were household names before there was even radio. It was the first big entertainment media. In its heyday, in the '20s and '30s, and even '40s, comic-strip characters were as popular as the biggest movie and TV stars now. The comic page readership has declined much more dramatically, especially as the publishers have diminished the size of comic strips physically; they've become nearly irrelevant.

ST: Did you want comic strips to have more political influence? Is that what you were looking for?

BB: Well I'm not looking for anything now. You mean in general? In abstract? No. "Doonesbury" actually does have political significance, but he (cartoonist Garry Trudeau) has to sacrifice quite a bit to get it. He's not read by many people, but he's read by the right people. To have real influence, you've got to slip in your polemics much more surreptitiously. This is always a fun challenge. You can always have a character stand up and say "Reagan sucks" like I did, or you can make the same argument without people knowing they're getting an argument made to them.

ST: Is ending this strip the same as ending "Bloom County" for you? Did the same sort of feelings arise?

BB: This is ending my cartooning career. Ending a career I never anticipated I was going to have. It's inviting risk into my life again. Once you get a successful comic strip it's like printing money. It's very difficult for anyone to cut a comic strip that's even vaguely successful. That's why a lot of them are so bad.

ST: Do you feel like things had gotten too safe for you?

BB: Yeah, in a way. Complacency is the inevitable conclusion of a successful comic strip. You can see it. Compare the "Peanuts" comic strips of today and the ones of 1964. Compare the vibrancy of the "Doonesbury" today and how it was the first few years of its life. The same with mine.

I'm editing my last book right now and I'm really amazed at how crude but fresh my early material was. That's the way with any artist. The best Beatles songs are always going to be the ones those guys wrote the first few years of their career, not the ones McCartney's gonna write next year. I don't know why it happens, but it does, unless you shift dramatically, which I'm hoping to do.

ST: What kinds of changes did you see in your work over the years?

BB: Now is a good time to ask me because I normally never read it. Right now I'm going back and picking out scripts I can comment on, and I always avoided that. I never liked it very much. I never thought I was doing a good job. But I find I really like the first couple of years of "Bloom County." Overwritten. Badly edited. Badly timed. Often poorly executed. But there was a freshness. You can tell I was really working hard.

ST: How could you tell that?

BB: Ideas. Characters. Situations. Originality. I was battling the "Doonesbury" influence on me, which was great! It was the only comic strip I had ever read and I was looking for my own way and I was looking really hard. I was starving. I had no money. At that point in a cartoonist's career you're always being threatened with firing. So you're worried week to week whether you're going to be there and that makes you work hard. When you get in a thousand newspapers and your characters are so well known they couldn't touch you no matter how bad you got, believe me something's going to suffer. I never got into the business for the financial rewards, I got into it by accident. I thought I'd be a war correspondent and photographer all my life.

ST: So how did you get into it?

BB: I used to work as a journalist but I lied routinely writing news stories in college, I didn't think any of them were interesting enough so I added my own details. It was just going to where the (comic) work was most efficient. It wasn't out of any intrinsic love for it. There's always been an element of guilt in my career that I not only made it a career, but I was successful at it and yet I never wanted it that bad. So I'm really happy leaving it behind, leaving it for people and kids who wanted it much more than I ever did and will probably be better at it.

ST: Do you plan on ever working again with the characters you've created?

BB: Definitely a possiblity in ways other than the comics page.

ST: So your quitting the strip doesn't mean you're abandoning the characters.

BB: Well . . . there's no guarantee. The question is open. I just would never go back to cartooning. If there's a life for them in film, that's something we'll work on later. I don't think they lend themselves naturally to an animated film, though a lot of people don't agree with that. Still, it's a possibility. I'd love to return to them. I have great affection for some of those characters. It was more disturbing than I would have guessed when I drew the last one because I didn't know for sure that I'd ever be drawing them again.

When you've been drawing a squiggle every day for the past 15 years and that squiggle talks to people in ways that it's very difficult to anticipate . . . I've gotten letters from people who feel Opus has saved their lives in moments of depression.

It's overwhelming to me, because they don't work on that level with me at all. It caught me by surprise when I drew the last one and realized I might not be drawing this guy again. There was a silent few moments at my drawing table when I grew very contemplative. I gave a silent farewell to my character as he disappeared into the Federal Express box.