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November 23, 2003
Welcome back Opus
As you might know, I work at a newspaper when I'm not puttering around the house or reading the Internetweb. And I have an interest in the continuation of newspapers, as lord knows, I hate job hunting.
So, it is with mixed emotions that I see that "Opus" is back in the comics, as a half-page Sunday strip. Mixed emotions because I know Berkeley Breathed has little faith in the future of newspapers. I'm wondering why he is doing the strip ... but I'm glad he is doing it.
I don't want the things that newspapers offer (including comics) to be irrelevant. And I'm as fustrated as he is over assembly line comics and Peanuts reprints from the 1970s. But can a 1980s icon bring back relevance (and readers)? We will see, I hope so anyway ... Opus is a good bird.
What follow are two good Breathed interviews I've found, with quotes.
The Onion's AV Club interviewed him in 2001:
O: Would you consider doing a newspaper strip again?BB: Pity the poor modern comic page. Frames the size of thumbnails. It started as the first mass-market entertainment medium in a world that didn't yet know television, film, or even radio. Its comic heroes were America's first celebrities, known coast to coast. Now, it's just a page of inky blur that only a 10-year-old's eyes could focus upon. It's the buggy whips of this millennium: quaint and eclipsed, sad to say.
And, recently Salon (yes, sorry — we're going to have a Salon link) talked to him about his return to newspapers:
Salon: Do you have a sense of mission with your return? Do you feel you have something to prove or accomplish?BB: There ain't no going home again. That truth burns with a vengeance on the comic page as in does in other popular entertainment. "Bloom County" had its perfect, temporary moment during the '80s ... the only moment it would have ever flourished. My goal now is to simply have some fun -- and I never really did before, oddly. If I can encourage other artists to have some fun too ... then that's about as big a mission as I'd want to claim. Actually being alive and aboveground is also an asset I'd like to encourage in more of today's strip cartoonists.