Berke Breathed gives an email interview to Salon as he begins another comic strip run (yay!) on November 23 in 160 newspapers. Bloom County / Outland was definitely one of the best news strips I've ever read and I'm glad to see more new Breathed material coming out. Good interview for anybody with interest in the penguin.

] Again, in the Onion interview, you claimed that it was
] no longer possible to
] satirize American politics. In the past two years, the
] (visible) political landscape
] has changed considerably. Do you still believe it's
] impossible to satirize?

]
] I think there's both a saturation point and a failure
] point in events being beyond satire. I started stripping
] in 1981, the same month that MTV started. Daily satirical
] comment was either "Doonesbury" or "The Tonight Show."
] The horizon was clear. We had the whole playing field.
] You young punks just try to imagine that there wasn't
] even a World Wide Web. Michael Jackson jokes passed as
] edgy comedy in "Bloom County."
]
] 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.

The penguin is mightier than the sword