The penguin is mightier than the sword

Salon has an email interview with Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed on his return to the funny papers this Sunday with Opus. Assuming the Sunday Post will be carrying it, I'll be subscribing. I can't wait - and you won't be able to either after reading the interview.

> Last we heard from you, via the Onion interview a few years back,
> the odds of you ever doing a strip again seemed pretty slim
> (to put it mildly). What changed?

The world went and got silly again. I left in 1995 with things properly, safely dull, and couldn't imagine why anyone would feel it necessary again to start behaving ridiculously. It would have been at least courteous of the Republicans to warn a few of us inclined to retire our ink-swords that they had King George waiting in his zoom-zoom jetsuit aching to start the Crusades again.

[...]

> Again, in the Onion interview, you claimed that it was no longer possible to

> satirize American politics. In the past two years, the (visible) political landscape

> has changed considerably. Do you still believe it's impossible to satirize?

I think there's both a saturation point and a failure point in events being beyond satire. I started stripping in 1981, the same month that MTV started. Daily satirical comment was either "Doonesbury" or "The Tonight Show." The horizon was clear. We had the whole playing field. You young punks just try to imagine that there wasn't even a World Wide Web. Michael Jackson jokes passed as edgy comedy in "Bloom County."

Now. Lord, now. The din of public snarkiness is stupefying. We're awash in a vomitous sea of caustic humorous comment. I hope to occasionally wade near the black hole of pop references only obliquely without getting sucked in with everyone else. Full disclosure: I'll admit that I had a momentary lapse and recently inked a strip where Opus' mom sees a picture of Michael Jackson in 1983, proclaims Jacko's old nose irresistible and voices an urgent wish to nibble it off down to the nub.

It took every thoughtful middle-aged fiber in my being for the courage to toss the finished strip. I did, but I wept.