American Mir A Production of the Children's Television Workshop
In case anybody missed it in yesterday's Sunday paper, Opus is back. One of the two best comic strips of all time, author Berkeley Breathed is resurrecting the star of Bloom County after almost ten years. The strip is big enough to have bumped two other strips from the Sunday funnies to make room. Good - a little more art, a few less setup-straight man-punchline joke strips.
Two online interviews, one with Opus and one with the reclusive artist:
From the Salon interview:
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.
Now the flip side of this is when events get untouchable. It becomes like the occasional lampoons of supermarket tabloids: unfunny because they're mocking something that's funnier than the satire. You can't effectively satirize Bill Clinton getting waxed by an office vixen in the office of Abraham Lincoln. It's done. Over. Go home. Know when you're beat. It almost was physically painful to watch the great Garry Trudeau have to try to get a handle on it.
...
Strips are in the tiny size and proportion that you see now to allow editors flexibility to cut the boxes apart and rearrange in psychedelic patterns all over their kitchen ceilings if they want, I guess. Bill Watterson halted this graphic slide toward nothingness several years into his strip ... and the editors screamed, but went along for the most part. They thought it was safely behind them until we offered them "Opus" in only one size.
Would I like to see other strips run similarly? Good God, yes ... if anyone bothers to put the work into the drawings. My drawings are going to be fun to look at or I'm going to get bored. And if readers want to see what bored cartoonists produce, take a look at much of the page. Actually, some are so bored, they're actually dead. That's another issue.
...
What would happen to all the hacks hired by Jim Davis to write and draw "Garfield" if we were to put it out of business? Remember what they did to Mel Gibson at the end of "Braveheart"? There's an idea.
> That said, would it be your wish to cause ripples?
As an end, controversy is a dead end. It's why TV shows tried to throw in nudity some years ago. I notice now that the ripples de jour are lesbian kisses. It's a sign of desperation, not good writing. Not to say that if I could figure out a way to throw in some hot lesbian action into "Opus," I wouldn't.
I can't even begin to tell you how happy this makes me.
For your non-Opus comic fixes, Tapestry has a list of several comic strips available online, along with RSS scrapes for those of us who live inside an aggregator. You can find current faves like Dilbert, Doonesbury, and Get Fuzzy, along with several online only stips like User Friendly and Pearls Before Swine. There is also a link to a daily recycling of the great Calvin & Hobbes, the strip that brought art back to the funny papers. Sadly, "Opus" is print only, so it isn't (nor will it be) available online.