A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

STILL LOOKING FOR MY BILLY AND THE BOINGERS SQUARE SINGLE: With Volume One of The Complete Bloom County Collection in stores next week, Berkeley Breathed is asked about the death of the comic strip:

You announced your retirement in 1989, and within the next few years, both Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and Gary Larson (The Far Side) were gone, as well.
You get a license to print money if you get in, which is why syndicates couldn’t believe I was doing that. But Bloom County was definitely a creature of the eighties. The humor was very specific, and it was going to get jaded and, I think, musty very quickly. There were too many raw edges to it, and you just can’t keep raw forever. The fact that other guys followed afterward was a wake-up call to the industry that something is amiss, and change is afoot, and maybe the glory days are never going to return.

And they never really did. With the exception of Dilbert and The Boondocks, there hasn’t been a culture-conquering newspaper strip in years.
When the three of us quit, it coincided with bad things happening in newspapers in general, and then the culture was suddenly awash in competitive humor. It siphoned a lot of the talent away. The future great cartoonists aren't sending their stuff anymore. They rightfully are working in graphic novels, or doing something else. It’s funny, you never hear anybody talking about it. People loved the comics over the last 100 years. They were hugely influential in popular culture, and they’re dying. They’re going fast. And nobody talks about it — it’s like they’re not even noticing. Along with newspapers, it’s this huge creative institution just disappearing into the ether behind us.