'Bloom County' cartoonist champions homeless pets
With luminous paintings, delightfully silly limericks and familiar twisted wit, Berkeley Breathed, the cartoonist who created "Bloom County," steps away from his recent string of children's books to bring us a catalog of canine misfortune with a message.
Breathed, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., with his wife, two children and a collection of pound mutts, began "Flawed Dogs: The Year-End Leftovers at the Piddleton 'Last Chance' Dog Pound" (Little, Brown & Co., $18.95) as another children's book but soon decided the stories were too complicated. Switching formats allowed him to reach more than one audience.
"It's in that gray area between children and adult," Breathed says. "I can't help but throw a bone to the adults in the audience. Kids will laugh at the pictures, but adults will get the more subtle humor."
True, for what small boy wouldn't love Willy Wonker, the tiny dog burrowing its way up an immense human nostril, or Pete, whose powerful effluence sends a toddler airborne.
And what adult wouldn't laugh at homely cross-eyed Pepe, who sees his own reflection as the handsome face of Richard Gere.
"I hope he thinks it's funny," Breathed laughs. His personal favorite in the motley collection is Barney, whose tattooist owner decorated his pet liberally before departing the Earth to become "Tattooer to the Angels."
"It's one of my better paintings," Breathed says. It also speaks to the cartoonist's singular sense of humor. "A dog with Elvis Presley on his ass is funny to me."
Breathed fans who remember only "Bloom County" may be surprised at how far the award-winning cartoonist has progressed as a painter. The illustrations in this book are drenched in rich color and awash with subtle details.
Each piece works in close partnership with an accompanying poem, which Breathed acknowledges is "not sophisticated prose."
Take Spanks, for example.
There's something 'bout Spanks
That no one dismisses:
This dog don't bark
But quite often hisses.
Don't fetch no ball
But eats tuna fishes
We'll say it right here:
Something's amisses.
Cute, but is doesn't make much sense unless you study the picture. If you take in the fake nose, the curve of that tail, the haughty gaze, you realize Spanks' only problem is that he's a cat.
"Most people don't get that," Breathed says with more than a hint of exasperation.
What he hopes readers do get is a two-fold message. Breathed is a strong supporter of pet shelters and obviously wants the book to educate people to the problem of homeless animals.
Some in the shelter movement, who have long fought the perception that pound dogs are flawed, recoiled at the title, he says, which brings us to the book's more subtle lesson.
"The only flaw of these dogs is that they exist without love and human partners," Breathed says. "The flaws are in our expectations. The whole thing is a metaphor. It speaks to how we view anything in life."
Is there a cat book in the future? Certainly not. They just aren't varied enough, Breathed says. "Dogs are stupidly different."
Fans of Breathed's kids books can get their holiday fix Dec. 5-28 when Book-it-Repertory Theatre stages a musical adaptation of "Red Ranger Came Calling: A Guaranteed True Christmas Story." (Ticket information: 206-216-0833 or www.book-it.org)
And happily, there is also a familiar penguin on the horizon. "Bloom County" fans can open the comics pages again when Opus returns to Sunday newspapers in his own strip. It starts in The Seattle Times Nov. 23.
Heather McKinnon: hmckinnon@seattletimes.com
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