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CANT_BREATHED

                                             September 4, 2021


I note with some surprise that at electoral-vote.com        E_V
Zenger picks "Berkeley Breathed" as his favorite
political cartoonist, and suggests he has a lot           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Breathed
in common with Feiffer.

Okay: Berkeley Breathed hit the scene as a fill-in
taking advantage of a hole left when Gary Trudeau
wanted to take a break for a while.  Breathed self-
consciously imitated the Doonsebury style, except
that the topics were far less likely to be political,
and the writing in general was clunky-- the formula
of a typical Bloom County involved someone (usually
the penguin or whatever he was... Opus, I guess)
saying something stupid, getting increasingly shrill,
then in the last panel he'd realize how he sounded
and break off and repudiate it.   The subjects were
rarely political (I want to say *never*, I can't
remember a single one in years, but that was fairly          And he somehow or other
casual reading, I was never a fan.)                          won a Pulitzer for
                                                             political cartooning in
   Breathed's style of art was *nothing* like                1987 for this stuff, so
   Feiffer, who was flowing and impressionistic              he must've acquired
   to Breathed's hard-edged profiles, characters             some substance after
   lined-up face to face in 2-D poses with a                 I gave up on him completely
   flat look like hieroglyphics.                             a few years into his run.

                                                                  And I see Feiffer
                                                                  got the award the
       I dunno what the Right Answer is on                        year before that--
       best political cartoonist, but I might                     which seems rather
       suggest Aaron McGruder who successfully                    late in his carreer.
       covered a lot of America's racial politics
       (and as he commented, he *made it cute*),
       in his comic strip "The Boondocks".





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