Berke Breathed gave his very first San Diego Comic Con Panel talk on Friday, and it was a truly great event. I tweeted about it live, and did a quick makeshift recording. I wasn’t sure I was even going to make it into the room, so I wasn’t fully set up when he started, and overall, I apologize for the poor quality of the piece. As I say in the intro, I would probably normally not post such a thing, but due to who it is we’re talking about, I’ll let you muddle through on your own.
There are references to slides on a screen here, so that might be a little hard to follow, but overall, I think you’ll find some very interesting stuff here. He even gets to be nicely controversial about the recent Pulitzer Prize Winners Letter about freedom of speech right at the very end. Whoo!
I went to a signing on Saturday with Berke, just to stand in line and ask him if it was all right that I posted this, and he gave me the thumbs up…so enjoy!
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Nice exclusive Tom! That’s one cartoonist I’d love to meet! But if I ever did, all I could manage to say would be “Ack!” or perhaps “Thhhpppppptt!”
*sigh* The man is my hero and yet he’s so “anti-comics” these days. It’s like falling in love with Hitler.
Well, he’s been anti-comics since 1990, I think. He told the story of the “Opus” cartoon with a woman wearing a “burkini” bathing suit…that was a real thing, not something he made up…and how much crap he took from the editors over it. That seemed to be the last straw. I think he just didn’t want to play that game and found there were far more creative opportunities out there for him. Sometimes I wonder if he’d think about doing a webcomic…just doing whatever he wanted, anytime. Think THAT’d get some hits?