Bloom County and Outland's creator had not been an avid newspaper comic fan when he took up a career in cartooning. On scrutinizing the funny pages, he found that "It needed a little kick in the ass, and nobody was doing it." *(1 Interview with The Onion on August 15, 2001.) Berke devised Bloom County with a quirky and entertaining cast of characters: a naïve talking penguin named Opus, a hairball-gagging scrawny tomcat named Bill and Ronald Ann, a curious but grim little girl with an oversized head and straw-like pigtails. As a fan of Gary Trudeau's work in Doonesbury, Berke's Bloom County had a similar barbed outlook and style, but was less political and used more fantasy.
Berke included Steve Dallas and Cutter John in Bloom County, two characters he created for his student newspaper cartoon, Academia Waltz. Academia Waltz ran in the Daily Texan of the University of Texas from 1978 to 1979. Berke created the voluminous number of 658 strips for the paper in that short time span. He was also a photographer and writer for the Daily Texan. *(2) Bloomcounty.com
Bloom County took its position on the funny pages on December 8, 1980 under the syndication of the Washington Post Writers Group. The syndicate editors saw the cartoon work of Berkeley Breathed through two published books of Academia Waltz, and he was commissioned as their first syndicated cartoonist. (They usually syndicated only political writers.) Bloom County took over the Washington Post newspaper slot left empty when Gary Trudeau took Doonesbury to a competing publication.
In 1987, the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning was awarded to Berke for his top-notch work in Bloom County. Two years later on August 6, 1989, the cartoonist retired the comic strip from the funny pages. At the time of ending, Bloom County reached a pinnacle with the hugely successful number of 1200 newspapers around the globe.
Under the Universal Syndicate, Berke began a second comic. Outland, a weird and far-fetched strip debuted as a Sunday-only with Ronald Ann plus new characters and format. Gradually, the other characters from Bloom County made their way into Outland, but the strip didn't catch on with comics fans as well as the first. He stopped creating Outland in 1995. Outland and Bloom County have been published in eleven best-selling cartoon collections with almost seven million copies in print.
