Breathed wrote a children's book titled "A Wish for Wings That Work," which starred Opus the penguin, in a Christmas story. It was turned into an animated TV special in 1991. Breathed has since written a number of other children's books, including "Goodnight Opus," "Red Ranger Came Calling," "Edwurd Fudwupper Fibbed Big" and the upcoming "Flawed Dogs."

Opus was not the main character in Breathed's earlier strips, but this time it's all about him, says Shearer. "Opus was always my personal favorite," he says. "I see him as Candide. He has a naive side and a big heart, and he is constantly discovering the wonder of it all. He wants to belong. He's trying to find his place. And he tells us about ourselves. We've all been in situations where we feel we don't belong."

Breathed, who now lives in Santa Barbara with his wife and two children, has tended toward the reclusive artist stereotype, eschewing the spotlight and granting few interviews. "It was out of a desire not to bore anybody," he said in a rare discussion with an online magazine called Onion. "I happen to think nearly everybody — especially those one might find in the odd issue of People magazine, including me — is frightfully boring. Especially me."

In an earlier news story, a friend described how Breathed toiled at his craft. "The way Breathed works is to sit slumped over the drawing board wearing boots and blue jeans with his shirt off. The stereo and TV are going at the same time, and little scraps of paper are taped up all over the side of his table with bits of dialogue and sketches of characters on them. . . . He doesn't talk much or move much, just the pen moving on the paper 'scratch,' 'scratch.' He exudes the same creative energy as a piece of melba toast."

In recent years, Breathed has been a critic of the trend to continually shrink the size of comic strips on newspaper comics pages. "Pity the poor modern comic page," he told Onion. "Frames the size of thumbnails. It started as the first mass-market entertainment medium in a world that didn't yet know television, film or even radio. . . . Now it's just a page of inky blur that only a 10-year-old's eyes could focus upon."

Hence, the half-page format that "Opus" will use. These are not only comic strips, says Shearer, but also works of art. "Berkeley has become an accomplished artist with watercolor. He'll use the space to tell a story, with varied block sizes. So many strips are just talking heads. He wants to do more. He wants to create excitement, movement. It's always been that way, and now even more so."

While Breathed became known for his "liberal, schmiberal" views, at the core of the strip is an underlying belief in traditional values — home, motherhood and herring pie. And when Onion magazine asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, his answer was simple: "Dad. The rest is frosting."

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