Thompson-esque persona Breathed displayed on his dust-jacket bios was half true: apparently he really did prefer kayaking and flying airplanes to sitting at his desk reading comics and drawing them (though I suspect he watched a lot of daytime TV). In Breathed’s case his only restraint-the mellow heart of the strip-was a Shel Silverstein-like mix of whimsy and perversity, and an unwillingness to talk down to children.īut he was uninfluenced by comics apart from Trudeau to hear Breathed tell the tale, he created Bloom County in a vacuum from the comics world, isolated after moving to Iowa City with his then-girlfriend. TIME+ LIFE=LIME magazine), and when it featured celebrities (like Frank Sinatra) they were fawned-over guest stars, not subjects of mockery. He used undisguised references to real people and things, real logos and real modified photographs even Li’l Abner, the newspapers’ onetime satire king, had always hidden its pop-culture references and product titles under cheesy disguises (i.e. Its appropriation of celebrity culture, politics and commercialism were the perfect expression of, and protest against, the booming ’80s. (Trudeau was heavier-handed than Breathed Trudeau’s parodies always had a point.)īloom County reshaped the boundaries of American newspaper comics. After his 1984 hiatus, Trudeau followed Breathed’s lead, introducing more spot blacks, thicker linework, wilder camera angles, and surreal pop-culture parodies like Ron Headrest and Mr. The two cartoonists later became friends, and by the late ’80s, the tables had turned: Bloom County influenced Doonesbury. Though Breathed’s squash-and-stretchy, Chuck Jones artwork was always distinct from Trudeau’s thin lines, Trudeau was Breathed’s model for a comic strip: early on, he even unconsciously reused an entire punchline with Milo Bloom in the place of Mike Doonesbury. Reading early Bloom County and its predecessor, Breathed’s college strip The Academia Waltz, the dominant flavor is Trudeau: the sex & dating jokes, the political humor, the first faint touches of surrealism (talking animals aside) with Zonker descending, like Snoopy into his Doghouse, into the depths of two-foot-wide Walden Puddle. “I’d never read any comic besides Doonesbury,” Berkeley Breathed wrote, whenever people asked him about his influences. “This sort of thing–the mocking self-consciousness–confounded the poor newspaper editors.

Bloom county