Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Classics of Western Literature 1986-1989 by ISBN 13: 9780316107549. Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989. Breathed, Berke. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. Spanning the entire run of the comic strip--from 1986 to 1989--this retrospective anthology brings together the best story lines of "Bloom County" "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Shipping: US$ 5.99 Within U.S.A. Customers who bought this item also bought. Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace. 1. Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989. Book Description Soft cover. Condition: New. 1st Edition. Seller Inventory # ABE-1491080681371. 2. BLOOM COUNTY 1986-1989. Book Description SOFTCOVER. Condition: NEW. Dust Jacket Condition: no dj. ANON (illustrator). First. MASS MARKET PAPERBACK. CONDITION: NEW. Seller Inventory # BB10R13_00196. 3. Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989. Book Description Condition: New. 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Seller Inventory # Q-0316107549. Shop With Us. Sell With Us. About Us. Find Help. Other AbeBooks Companies. Follow AbeBooks. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Berkeley Breathed. Guy Berkeley "Berke" Breathed (born June 21, 1957) is an American cartoonist, children's book author/illustrator, director and screenwriter, best known for Bloom County , a 1980s cartoon-comic strip that dealt with sociopolitical issues as understood by fanciful characters (e.g., and the Penguin) and through humorous analogies. Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. Contents. Early life. Cartooning career. Breathed became published first when he was hired part-time by the Austin American-Statesman to draw editorial cartoons for the newspaper. This job was short-lived; he was dismissed shortly after one of his cartoons caused outrage. [3] His first comic strip published regularly was The Academia Waltz, which appeared in the Daily Texan , in 1978 while he was a student at the University of Texas. While at the University of Texas, Breathed self-published two collections of The Academia Waltz , using the profits to pay his tuition. The comic strip attracted the notice of the editors of The Washington Post , who recruited him to do a nationally syndicated strip. On December 8, 1980, Bloom County made its debut and featured some of the characters from Academia Waltz, including former frat-boy Steve Dallas and the paraplegic Vietnam war veteran Cutter John. In the beginning, the strip's style was so similar to that of another popular strip, Doonesbury , that Doonesbury's creator Garry Trudeau wrote to Breathed several times to indicate their similarities. [4] Breathed has acknowledged that he borrowed liberally from Doonesbury during his early career. In the collection, One Last Little Peek , Breathed even put an early Bloom County side-by-side with the Doonesbury comic strip from which it obviously took its idea. Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning during 1987. [5] The strip eventually appeared in over 1,200 newspapers around the world until Breathed retired the daily strip in 1989, stating that he wanted to terminate the strip while it was still popular. At that time, he said, "A good comic strip is no more eternal than a ripe melon. The ugly truth is that in most cases, comics age less gracefully than their creators". [6] He replaced this strip with the surreal Sunday-only cartoon Outland in 1989, which reused some of the Bloom County characters, including and Bill the Cat. He ended Outland in 1995. In 2003, Breathed began the comic strip Opus , a Sunday-only strip featuring Opus the Penguin, who was one of the main characters of Bloom County . Several newspapers chose not to run the August 26, 2007, Opus cartoon because it might offend Muslims. [7] On October 6, 2008, Breathed announced plans to discontinue all work on comic strips with the final Opus strip to run on November 2, 2008. [8] Breathed plans to focus on writing children's books. [2] Breathed explained that he felt that the United States was going to face "tough times", and that he wanted to end the saga of his most memorable character "on a lighter note". The last Opus comic strip appeared on schedule, but in what may be a comic first the final panel required an online link. The final panel the strip showed Opus sleeping peacefully in the bed depicted in the classic children's book, Goodnight Moon . This panel was available only online, and the Humane Society page that displayed it no longer exists. Breathed said that he had no regrets in leaving political cartooning, as he believes the atmosphere became too bitter for him to make quality cartoons. [9] Other works. In addition to his syndicated cartoon work, which has produced eleven best-selling cartoon collections, he has also produced five children's books, two of which, A Wish for Wings That Work and Edwurd Fudwupper Fibbed Big , were made into animated films. Since 1992, he has designed a greeting card and gift ensemble collection for American Greetings, featuring the "Bloom County" characters Opus, Bill the Cat, and Milquetoast the Cockroach. Breathed's writing has also been featured in numerous publications, including Life , Boating , and Travel and Leisure , and he produced the cartoon art for the closing credits of the Texas-based film, Secondhand Lions , which featured a strip called Walter and Jasmine . The panels he drew for Secondhand Lions appear in Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best , in which Breathed terms them "the comic strip that never was". Breathed has been a supporter of the animal rights group PETA and illustrated the cover of their Compassionate Cookbook , T-shirts, and other merchandise. Breathed cameos as himself in the short film Tim Warner: A Life in the Clouds , a fictional tale about an unhappy cartoonist and his unfunny strip, The Silver Lining . [10] Breathed adapted his children's book Edwurd Fudwupper Fibbed Big into a short film produced by Disney. The 2011 motion-capture Disney film Mars Needs Moms was based on Breathed's picture book of the same name. Personal life. Breathed is a fan of outdoor activities such as powerboating and motorcycling. In 1986, he broke his back in an ultralight-plane crash, later incorporated into a Bloom County storyline in which Steve Dallas breaks his back after being attacked by an angry Sean Penn. Breathed also nearly lost his right arm to a boating accident. [4] Breathed and his two children live in Santa Barbara, in southern California. He is reportedly a very private person, and although he has given interviews to online magazines such as The Onion and Salon , he rarely gives face-to-face or telephone interviews and resists talking about himself. He supports animal rights, and his book, Flawed Dogs: The Year-End Leftovers at the Piddleton 'Last Chance' Dog Pound , promotes animal adoption. Breathed befriended science fiction humorist Douglas Adams when Adams moved to Santa Barbara in 1999. Adams was also very keen on wildlife preservation. During the middle of September 1990, while visiting a factory in England, Mr. Breathed noticed he received odd, humorous looks from the workers upon hearing his name. After inquiring about the reason for their strange looks, he learned that his nickname, "Berke", is a homophone with "Berk", a vulgar term for a vagina in Cockney rhyming slang ("Berkeley Hunt"). [11] Breathed once stated he is an atheist. [12] On May 18, 2008, in his comic strip Opus , he announced he was suffering from a condition known as spasmodic torticollis. [13] Bloom County. A popular daily comic strip of the 1980s, Bloom County was written and drawn by Berkeley Breathed. During its run, the comic strip reveled in political, cultural, and social satire. Capturing popular attention with witty comment, the strip also offered a new perspective in the comics. Bloom County began in 1980 with the setting of the Bloom Boarding House in the mythical Bloom County. Both boarding house and county appeared to be named for a local family, originally represented in the comic strip by the eccentric Major Bloom, retired, and his grandson Milo. Other original residents included Mike Binkley, a neurotic friend of Milo; Binkley's father; Bobbi Harlow, a progressive feminist school teacher; Steve Dallas, a macho despicable lawyer; and Cutter John, a paralyzed Vietnam vet. Over the years, the boarding house residents changed; the Major and Bobbi Harlow vanished and the human inhabitants were joined by a host of animals including Portnoy, a hedgehog, and Hodge Podge, a rabbit. But two other animals became the most famous characters of the strip. One, a parody of Garfield, was Bill the Cat, a disgusting feline that usually just said "aack." The other was the big-nosed penguin named Opus, who first appeared with a much more diminutive honker as Binkley's pet, a sorry substitute for a dog. Opus eventually became the star of the strip and when Breathed ended the comic, he was the last character to appear. Breathed used his comic menagerie to ridicule American society, culture, and politics. Reading through the strip is like reading through a who's who of 1980s references: Caspar Weinberger, Oliver North, Sean Penn and Madonna, Gary Hart. Breathed made fun of them all. In the later years of the strip, Donald Trump and his outrageous wealth became a chief focus of Breathed's satire. In the world of Bloom County, Donald Trump's brain was put in the body of Bill the Cat. The strip supposedly ended because Trump the Cat bought the comic and fired all of the "actors." Breathed didn't restrain himself to ridiculing individuals. He also attacked American fads, institutions, and corporations. Opus had a nose job and constantly bought stupid gadgets advertised on TV. Milo and Opus both worked for the Bloom Picayune, the local newspaper, and Breathed used them to launch many attacks on the media. He lampooned the American military through the creation of Rosebud, a basselope (part basset hound, part antelope) that the military wanted to use to smuggle bombs into Russia. Corporations such as McDonalds and Crayola felt the barb of Breathed's wit, though not as much as Mary Kay Cosmetics. Breathed had Opus's mother being held in a Mary Kay testing lab. Breathed used this to point out the cruelties of animal testing as well as the extremism of the animal rights terrorists. The terrorists faced off against the Mary Kay Commandos, complete with pink uzis. Breathed was adept at political satire as well. Whenever the country faced a presidential election, The Meadow Party would emerge with its candidates: Bill the Cat for President and an often reluctant Opus for V.P. Breathed used the two to ridicule not only politicians but the election process and the American public's willingness to believe the media campaigns. Breathed had a definite political slant to his comic, but he made fun of the follies of both conservatives and liberals. Bloom County was a unique creation not only because of its humor, but because of the unusual perspectives Breathed used. Unlike other comics, Bloom County 's animal and human characters interacted as equals and spoke to each other. Breathed also made the strip self-reflexive, often breaking from the comic to give comments from the "management" or from the characters themselves. One sequence featured Opus confused because he hadn't read the script. Setting the comic up as a job for the characters to act in, Breathed was able to acknowledge the existence of other strips, making jokes about them and featuring guest appearances by characters from other comic strips. As Bloom County came to an end, Breathed had the characters go off in search of jobs in the other comics strips, such as Family Circle and Marmaduke. While some other comics have used this technique as well, notably Doonesbury, it remains rare in comics, and Bloom County was most often compared to Doonesbury for content and attitude. Also like Doonesbury , in 1987 Bloom County won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. The strip was not without its flaws, the chief one being a lack of strong female characters, a lack Breathed was well aware of (and commented on in the strip). While the male characters stayed strong, the female characters dropped out. When the strip ended, the only female characters were Ronald-Ann, a poverty stricken African American girl and Rosebud the Basselope who earlier in the comic's run turned out to be female. Besides a lack of women characters, many readers felt that the comic was offensive and not funny and often lodged complaints with Breathed. Breathed ended the strip in 1989 when he felt he had reached the end of what he could do with these characters. He followed Bloom County with a Sunday-only strip called Outland. The strip at first featured Opus and Ronald-Ann though most of Bloom County 's cast eventually showed up. It never gained the popularity of its predecessor, and Breathed stopped writing comics and turned to the writing of children's books. —P. Andrew Miller. Further Reading: Astor, David. "Breathed Giving Up Newspaper Comics." Editor and Publisher. January 21, 1995. Breathed, Berkeley. Bloom County Babylon. Boston, Little Brown, 1986. ——. Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989. Boston, Little Brown, 1990. Buchalter, Gail. "Cartoonist Berke Breathed Feathers His Nest by Populating Bloom County with Rare Birds." People Weekly. August 6, 1984. Book Review: Bloom County Classics of Western Literature. And so Berke Breathed grew up to write a comic strip in which the characters were children and animals and the plots were headline news stories. For ten years he drew the cartoon daily. Toward the end of this book he announces the transition to drawing it weekly…in news-story mode: the plot line is that Donald Trump’s body has died, his brain has been implanted into the brain-dead body of Bill the Cat, and he’s “developing” Bloom County by firing all the other characters. This Fair Trade Book was discussed on the Blogspot a few years ago (and, yes, it sold). In view of its timeliness, it’s reappearing here. In this collection we watch Quiche dump Steve because he spends some time in a body brace, Opus jilt Lola because despite his lovableness he’s just another commitment-phobic 1980s youth at heart, Milquetoast the Cockroach test everybody’s commitment to nonviolence, Oliver blow his cool when asked what led up to the Big Bang, “Deathtongue” morph into “Billy and the Boingers” and expire, the other characters banish Opus from the boardinghouse after hearing a sermon about “penguin lust,” Rosebud admit that the character “he” always insisted was male is “played by” a female (who later gets pregnant), Steve sue Santa Claus for delivering violence-promoting toys, Zygort aliens convert Steve into a Sensitive New Age Guy, Opus try to become a smoker, the kids make (and give away) a fortune selling hair tonic made from Bill’s underarm sweat, Opus attempt to rescue his mother from the Mary Kay Cosmetics test lab, and Ronald-Ann lure Opus from reenacting “Star Trek” to sipping pretend tea with her headless doll. Newsmaking people (and products) are mentioned by name every five or six pages and by implication in almost every strip. If you don’t remember the original news stories, will you still chortle over every page? Probably. If you don’t get a joke, you’re sure to find someone who can explain it. Real cats don’t have underarm sweat glands; real penguins don’t look like Opus, either. According to the stereotype of the 1980s, Vietnam veterans like John (the most sensible man in Bloom County) were supposed to be the drugged-out wrecks; in Bloom County that social function is taken over by Bill. But Mary Kay cosmetics, which were marketed by and to church ladies, really were “tested” by torturing animals just like Revlon and Max Factor, and there really were religious conflicts, in some Protestant families, between women (stereotypically the daughters) who boycotted the cosmetics for that reason and women (stereotypically the mothers) who wanted to support fellow church ladies’ business. If he’d had a wife or a sister, Breathed might have been able to exploit the further irony that the real reason why girls like me didn’t buy Mary Kay was that smearing any “moist” stuff on our faces aggravated our acne…unfortunately this comedic element was missing even from the full sequence that was published as Night of the Mary Kay Commandos . However, as with Pogo and Charlie Brown, the humor of these cartoons is so universal that missing a few topical points wouldn’t keep you from enjoying the book. Steve’s “sensitive” phase was part of a trend, but it’s funny because Steve’s only lovable quality is his complete ignorance of what True Love might be. Opus’s persecution reflects 1980s fear of the influence of the Religious Right, but it’s funny because the children and animals care about each other. Most of the people who wanted this collection already have it, and now it’s possible to get the five-volume collection of Bloom County reprints here… Classics of Western Literature is, however, a collector’s item and a Fair Trade Book, not to mention being a valuable source of pre-campaign jokes. To buy it online here, send $5 per book + $5 per copy to either address at the lower left-hand corner of the screen, and I’ll send $1 per book to Breathed or the charity of his choice. Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989 (1990) Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Bloom County BRILLIANCE! Good stuff! This collection is from the last years of the Bloom County syndicated comic strip, selected story-lines and strips from its mid-80s peak right up to the last panel created for Bloom County. I bought a copy of this book in 1991, I loved Bloom County and thought it was one of the best, freshest and most entertaining comic strips I had ever read. I still have the book and reread it every year or so and I can honestly say I still enjoy it as much as the first time I ever picked it up. True. some of the references are terribly dated, and don't have the same punch they once did but the same thing could be said about a lot of us. I recommend Bloom County (this edition or any other) for anyone who likes irreverent and silly humor. ( )