![]() At the time - and this was a couple of months ago - it made me think that there would have been no "Bloom County" without "Mockingbird" because I was 12 I read it, and the book's fictional Southern small town of Maycomb had settled deep into my graphic imagination and informed it forever. GROSS: So why don't we get to that part of the interview that Sam did with Berkeley Breathed.īERKELEY BREATHED: I watched slack-jawed in horror as they threw one of the 20th century's most iconic fictional heroes, Atticus Finch, under the bus. And it made him reconsider his own characters. And Berkeley Breathed was worried that this was going to kill off the character in the imagination of readers. In the original "To Kill A Mockingbird," Atticus Finch is this very heroic character and in "Go Set A Watchman," he's portrayed as a racist. He had a big, emotional reaction to the publication, and mostly because he was upset how the character Atticus Finch was treated. GROSS: So there's an interesting back story that you had started telling me about how Berkeley Breathed brought back the strip in part because of his connection to Harper Lee who wrote "To Kill A Mockingbird." And this past summer, the original draft of "To Kill A Mockingbird" was published under the title of "Go Set A Watchman," and he was very upset when it was published.īRIGER: Yeah, that's right. And it often lampooned popular cultural figures of the day and politicians as well.īRIGER: Well, like Donald Trump, for one.īRIGER: And he's actually made it back in the new version, "Bloom County 2015." It took place in a small, Midwestern town called Bloom County, and there are a variety of characters, including probably the most famous which was a penguin named Opus. GROSS: Tell us something about the strip.īRIGER: Yeah, it was in the funny pages. ![]() GROSS: So Bloom County won a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, but it's not a strip that was ever on the editorial pages per se. That's where he's posting it now.īRIGER: That's right. SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: Well, I was surprised to find it on Facebook. Sam how did you find out that "Bloom County" was back? Our producer Sam Briger used to read "Bloom County" and was pleasantly surprised when he discovered the strip had returned so he recorded an interview with Berkeley Breathed which we're about to hear, and Sam is here to introduce it. Anthologies that collected the strip were best-sellers. At the time, "Bloom County" was published in over 1,200 newspapers. Berkeley Breathed has brought back his popular comic strip "Bloom County" after having retired it 25 years ago at the height of its popularity.
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