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By Tim Grobaty‘Bloom County Babylon’ covers the first five yearsBook chronicles the numerous changes of Breathed's townKnight-Ridder NewspapersIn any small, perfectly American town you’ll find that, despite a facade of stability, people and things come and go. Without that change there is no vibrancy.“Bloom County,” the comic strip, changes like a town. Probably, not since Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” have so many characters waltzed in and out of a strip, with some lingering longer than others, a few settling down for good, calling it home.You get the sense of the continuum most effectively by paging through the just-released collection Bloom County Babylon: Five Years of Basic Naughtiness” (Little, Brown. $12.95) by Berke Breathed, the 29-year-old creator of Bloom County and its pastoral Milo’s Meadow, who is actually closing in on six years of chronicling the citizens and creatures of the community.The opening pages of the collection recall some who have gone: The Major, the cantankerous old . man from the early days; Limekiller, an aging, transient hippie full of trenchant remarks and new-age platitudes; Rabies, the cigar-chomping ..hound wise beyond his species.“They die if the character is not independent enough or does not merit existence,” said car-toonist-as-god Breathed in a phone interview from his home in Evergreen, Colo,, a suburb 20 miles west of Denver (featuring, fortunately, a terrain unconducive to flying ultralight airplanes. He was seriously injured in an ultralight accident in New Mexico in January, sending his strip into reruns for two weeks).Then there are those who currently inhabit the strip, which appears in more than 900 newspapers in the country, including the Register. Of these, the most popular, currently, is Opus, the big-beaked, slightly overweight penguin, now celebrated in T-shirts and other marketables. He appears on the cover of “Bloom County Babylon” in an eye-catching painting by Jim Newport.’VThe promise of more Opuses inside no doubt contributed to the fact that the book entered the New York Times best-sellers list at No. 2, ahead of a couple of cartoonist Gary Larson’s Far Side collections.Breathed (rhymes with method) is not surprised about the penguin’s popularity. “Nothing surprises me in this business, but it was certainly unexpected,” said Breathed. “As a cartoonist, you’re always looking for characters to hit, but if you try to calculate it, you will fail for sure, so I’ve just let my imagination run wild.Vi“When you see something that draws the public's fancy, you don’t draw to it, but you don’t take it for granted, either. You don't start calculating all your strips to try to appeal to what you think is going to be a popular aspect of the strip; then the strip loses its popularity, I think.Associated Press“I mean if you look through the book, you’ll find characters that come in and-out constantly and none of them had any expectations whatsoever,” said Breathed. It was whatever struck me as funny at the moment. Including Opus. I had no intentions of using him in more than just a few strips.”Opus came into Bloom County one day just about five years ago. Binkley, Breathed’s fey, semineurotic young lad with the macho, blue-collar father, brought the penguin home one afternoon, telling his father that it was a German shepherd. “Very macho.”The next day, Opus began learning the English language by watching Mister Rogers” on the TV.“Talk about an inauspicious entrance,” said Breathed. I was just thinking of making a week’s worth of silly cartoons about Binkley coming back with a penguin, but here I’d stumbled upon the fact that people love penguins and no one had taken advantage of it in the past in a comic strip.”Originality was not a trademark of the strip. When it started, “Bloom County appeared to be an unabashed rip-off of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” strip. Breathed admits the resemblance was more than casual. “Garry Trudeau wasn’t the biggest influence; he was the only influence,” he said. “I just was not a comics reader and I had no other place where I could be influenced. In college he was ubiquitous.”Breathed studied photojournalism at the University of Texas. “I basically lived at the Daily Texan,” he said. “I did writing, edited a magazine, a lot of photography, but cartooning was fun and it was the easiest way to distinguish myself. His college strip was popular with the students and other people around Austin, but it owed more than just a tip of the hat to Trudeau.Today, he has broken away from his idol’s grasp, as anyone who reads both “Bloom County” and Doonesbury” knows.“I think Trudeau’s still the best satirist working in the country today, said Breathed. His strip has certainly changed and I think his appeal is different than it was, Thus, when people suggest that I’m still a rip-off or a clone, while in the past I was happy to discuss that, I think it’s silly now. Our styles have diverged rather than converged,I think in my college years I was doing my ver-Berke Breathed has just released a collection of five years of 'Bloom County.’sion of his strip; now I’m really quite happy with my own direction.”The 520 daily strips and 80 color Sunday strips in “Bloom County Babylon give a perfectly comprehensive picture of the direction that county Bloom has come from. No one knows where it goes from here. It kind of depends on Breathed, the guy who runs the town.“Actually, I’d like to be orignal and say the characters aren’t based on me,” he said. “But I do have to admit that they’re all aspects of my personality and broken down, sort of segmented. Oliver Wendell Jones represents my interest in science. Milo, when he’s working at the newspaper, is sort of my career extended out from when I used to work at the (college) paper. I had no journalistic ethics whatsoever. So various areas of my life I sorta live vicariously through my characters,”Even the unctuous, smarmy, immoral, lecherous, profligate character Steve Dallas? “Probably,” he said. nI’d have to admit I’m somewhere there, though it’s not an admirable thing to admit.”Unlike Dallas, though, Breathed is through chasing women. He got married two months ago.His book, though, is dedicated not to his new wife, Jody, but to his basset hound, Sophie.“There are priorities,” he said.
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