> What do you hope to achieve with a strip? A laugh? Or something more?

Something much more. A laugh from me.

> A lot of old syndicated comics used teams of artists, writers and inkers to
> produce their work. Are your strips a one-man show, or do you have help?

If you need all that help, well, you're -- Jim Davis, actually. Rich and slothful. The comic strip works best as deeply personal art and writing produced by near-insane, passionate creators. Like music and filmmaking, actually. The more hands-off it becomes, inevitably, the more boring it becomes, if not actually killable (a unique aspect to our business).

> With "Outland," you took a whole lot of chances visually, which didn't
> always go over too well with readers. Now, eight years later, do you
> have any game plan to balance experimentation with accessibility?

Balancing creative growth and experimentation with accessibility is the issue of the day for any artist. All I can say is that there's nothing more populist than a comic strip. The comic page is not the place for the whacked-out Jackson Pollocks out there to ram their nutso visions down the readers' throats ... not that I haven't tried that myself. The counterpoint to overexperimentation is being offered "Blondie" 73 years after it started. But we also have to stay interested ourselves. There's the balance. And balance is the operative word.

> You've spent the better part of the last decade working on children's
> books, where you have an extremely fine control over color and detail.
> Is it safe to assume that this is one of the reasons why that medium
> has been so attractive? If this is the case, having worked in that form, have you
> gained a different perspective on how to use the cruder boundaries of newsprint?

Painting picture books necessitated me actually learning something about art. And like a baby armed with a new box of colorful crayons and a newly painted living room wall ... I'm anxious to wreak some havoc.

> What kinds of things keep you visually interested in a strip?

Emotion. Raw visible emotion. It's virtually absent from most comics today. It flared warmly with "Calvin and Hobbes" and has mostly disappeared again. That and nudity.

> How frequently does an idea for a strip begin with a gag or punch line,
> vs. beginning with a visual idea, or even a conceptual/structural idea
> (a different arrangement of the frames, for example)?

The reality of a cartoon strip or character is vapor-thin. I doggedly decline to test that gossamer construction by discussing the characteristics of the smoke it is made of. 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.

Especially a smudgy one a half-inch high on newsprint. The power we find in our hands if we're one of the lucky few that find that we have invented such a thing fills me with the awe that I normally reserve for watching my children sleep or contemplating the age of starlight or watching George Bush Jr. try to actually pronounce the word "to" without leaving the "o" off.

> Can a strip be socially relevant without resorting to pop-culture references?

Ya know, just reading those words "socially relevant" made me physically wince just now. Our job is to make people smile. If my cartoons stray into -- I'm sorry, I can't type them again ... those words you used above -- it's an accidental byproduct in the effort to make ME smile.

> What is it you most love about the medium of the comic strip?

If the "Opus" comic strip were instead a movie, for instance, I'd have to send a memo to Bob Weinstein (when I knew he was having a good morning and enjoying his eggs) and ask if he wouldn't mind me drawing a panel where his ass falls off while flossing too vigorously. Opus' ass, not Bob's. Later, I'd have to follow up with a budget adjustment requesting the funds for drawing the ass falling off. Later we'd have to cut the scene after two 14-year-old boys in Dubuque wearing pants well below their own ass wrote on their test-screening response card that the butt scene sucked.

I love comic strips because I can skip the above.

But then, coincidentally, I actually am making "Opus" into a movie right now. And I should add here that I hope Bob Weinstein understands that I'm just having a little fun and that I honestly think of him like a father.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

It may be that satire is truly impossible now. Recent so-called parodies in the Onion almost read as straight news. But in a way, "Bloom County" can be read as a forerunner to the type of self-aware flotsam that washes over the media at the turn of the century. Likewise, Breathed's 1987 Pulitzer Prize seems an acknowledgment that the traditional boundaries of "news" had begun to blur. In 2003, that lands Breathed in Newsweek alongside other "newsmakers" such as Hollywood couple Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith.

You can't go home again, though the modern comic strip might be as close as you can get. Trapped between the many streams of popular culture and the classical bounds of simple narrative, comics have essentially become contemporary dumb shows -- which was always an unfortunate name for simple gestures that are so revealing.

"You know, when I was little, I didn't know anything about politics. But I read those strips and I knew that Ronald Reagan was a bad man," the clerk at the bookstore tells me, ringing up a used copy of an out-of-print "Bloom County" anthology, one of the many "a little mildewed from sitting at the base of all those toilets in all those bathrooms throughout America during the '80s," as Breathed described them to the Onion.

"They have a half-life of a flounder laying on the back porch," he claimed. This hasn't prevented "Bloom County" reruns from becoming among the best-selling strips on UClick.com, a subscription-based comic site. Breathed's '80s strips were rife with topical humor, and those references have certainly become dated. But unstable substances have a way of mutating, and -- with all the historical context drained from them -- "Bloom County" strips have transmogrified the '80s, turning names like "Caspar Weinberger" into objectively bizarre monikers just as strange as any villain Little Nemo might face in Slumberland.

Separated from circumstance, one can truly begin to appreciate Breathed's strategy of the absurd, in which human truths reveal themselves within his etched lines. Breathed doesn't seem particularly inclined to discuss how his art works. At "Bloom County's" peak, he would frequently cram a month's worth of work into 90 hours, followed by a trip to the airport to put the strips -- and sometimes himself, if he hadn't yet finished them -- on a plane to the syndicate in Washington. In that feverish state, "Bloom County" must have seemed like a dream, ready to slip away the next morning.

What was undoubtedly deeply personal for Breathed became instinctively so for his readers. By bridging the space between a child's wonder and an adult's confusion -- the kinds of thoughts grown-ups contemplate after they have turned the light off, but before they have fallen asleep -- Breathed did something wonderful: He individualized politics.

This is why the reappearance of a penguin on the funny pages is a profoundly good thing. If "Bloom County" and "Outland" were dream worlds, then they hit their readers early in the day, maybe over breakfast, when the pleasant haze of dreams still hung in their consciousness. And if they hit right, they might be able to pull that innocent state full into the daylight, if only for a second.

Even if Breathed resists the urge to go political with "Opus," it's hard to imagine him turning in anything remotely escapist. It would be ridiculous to think that Opus the penguin can change anything. But it gives one pause to think of 105 million readers simultaneously plunged into Breathed's fantasyland for 10 or 15 seconds apiece. It might even make him smile.

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