'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.
— Berkeley Breathed
I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child - which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.
I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I'd spent a childhood in a far different place.
That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.
And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.
Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.
I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas' Daily Texan.
I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.
Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.
It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.
I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.
Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.
I paint digitally now. A pity, in some ways, as the biggest price one pays is that you no longer have a finished piece of physical art to hang on a wall. I miss that terribly.
I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.
If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize.
I happen to think nearly everybody - especially those one might find in the odd issue of 'People' magazine, including me - is frightfully boring, Especially me. And Tom Cruise. Tom and I are alike in only this way.
Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books.
I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.
Keep in mind that in 1985, I had a potential readership of over 50 million Americans. At that time, a good portion of those were under 30.
Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
My post-child period resulted in one instant change: I write shorter books for kids.
I knew 'Mars Needs Moms! ' would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually.
If I could have drawn a cat yelling for lasagna every day for 15 years and have them pay me $30 million to do so, I would have.
The comic page is dying; I didn't want to go with it.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.
