Howard Cruse on Garry Trudeau and Berke Breathed

RINGGENBERG: Do you like Garry Trudeau's work?
CRUSE: Sure! If a course could get him, it'd be a real coup. But who can get him to do anything? He doesn't believe in self-promotion!
RINGGENBERG: What about Berke Breathed, who does Bloom County? Do you like his work, or do you think it's too derivative of what Trudeau has done?
CRUSE: It was derivative when it started, but I think he's got his own thing going now. There's lot of difference between Doonesbury and Bloom County now. At first it was kind of embarrassing. You don't want to see somebody imitate somebody else quite that obviously. But Breathed has gotten more independent as time passed. There's all sorts of things he does visually now that Trudeau never does. Trudeau almost never has close-ups, for instance. And the whole graphic style of Bloom County today is looser than Doonesbury's.
RINGGENBERG: It's almost more accessible because of that looseness. Breathed seems less obviously intellectual.
CRUSE: It has a different flavor. They're both intellectual strips. Breathed's has its political content, but it takes more leaps of fantasy. On the other hand, Bloom County doesn't have the detailed political underpinnings that Doonesbury has. There's a sense that Garry Trudeau has a fully rounded political philosophy, whereas Breathed doesn't put forward that strong a point of view.
RINGGENBERG: I think it's in the timing that Breathed owes his greatest debt to Doonesbury. Aside from subject matter, it's the way he times his gags. You get that little kicker in the last panel.
CRUSE: The double gag line.
RINGGENBERG: Topping the punch line.
CRUSE: Sometimes it doesn't top it, but it's a grace note to the punch line. You have two pieces of dialogue in the last panel: the punch line and the grace note. That's something they both do. And there are graphic things, like using italics for dialogue with no balloon and just a line pointing You can't escape it. Breathed obviously got that stuff from Trudeau. But I think that at this point it's ridiculous to beat him over the head with that, because by now he's got a very original strip going.
RINGGENBERG: Well Trudeau copped the no-balloon style, probably, from Alex Raymond.
CRUSE: The effect is a little different in Doonesbury, but...y'know, it's practically impossible to invent something totally new in the language these days. You're always adapting things that have been done.

[and if you want to see Breathed truly aping Trudeau, read The Academia Waltz]