Berkeley Breathed moves Bloom County to Patreon

Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County was one of the last great mega-hit comic strips of physical newspapers, running daily from 1980 to 1989, and then sporadically in various spin-offs and formats in newspapers until 2009. A satirical mix of politics and small town humor, the original strip ended with a story involving Donald Trump’s brain being placed into a cat. Prescient. The strip won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1987. 

In 2015, Breathed relaunched the strip digitally on Facebook and Instagram as Bloom County Continues, with occasional but regular content featuring Bill the Cat, Milo the penguin, Steve Dallas and the rest of the satirical gang. 

But now Breathed has announced he’s moving from Meta run apps to Patreon, where subscribers will be able to see new content for $3 a month, at least to start. On FB he wrote:

Opus, Bill, Steve and your Bloom County family are moving!

…To a new home more expansive than social media. We invite

our readers to join us for the gang’s continuing adventures, plus behind-the-scene peeks at 45 years of scandals, secrets, unseen art, animation, custom sketch offers and my memories stretching from Hollywood to the pre-gilded Oval Office. But the death of the newspaper comic page means we’ll need some small support from you or we’ll have to exit. We’ll still post here on occasion, but my full stories and extras will be at Patreon for $3 a month starting January 12. The world isn’t growing less buffoonish. Become a Bloom County Patron and we’ll face it together with matching buffoonery. Let us know your thoughts.

THE BEAT: First one is simple: why? You had a big, solid audience on Facebook so why switch to Patreon?

BREATHED: I’ve published ten years of Bloom County on FB and Instagram, together claiming over 800,000 listed followers.  Great fun but… it’s essentially Cartooning for Free. Now, one can create as a gift to the fans for a while, as could Taylor Swift, but eventually reality does a check. As does California property taxes.  Patronage is a great way to fold the supportive relationship of a creator back into the fan’s hands, as once a comic page did. I now work for them. And it’s a wind behind any creator’s back. 

THE BEAT: That said, FB’s monetization method is more opaque than Patreon’s. What advantages does it have being on a more neutral, transparent and scalable platform like Patreon?

BREATHED: Honest answer:  connects the fans to the work in a way that the mass obliqueness of social media just can’t match.  The numbers will shrink… but the dedication will grow. I like that. 

THE BEAT: You’re starting out with a single $3 subscriber level. Will you be adding new tiers or rewards?  

BREATHED: Absolutely.  Probably personal sketches… and —most fun— individual reproductions of the fan’s favorite single panels going back 45 years, executed just for them.  Lots of ideas.  

THE BEAT: Since you brought Bloom County back about a decade ago you’ve turned out strips on an occasional basis. How frequently do you think you’ll be doing new strips on Patreon? Will the move have any effect on you creatively?

BREATHED: Aiming for five strips a week with lots of extras folded in:  there are stories, escapades, secrets and scandals that wait to be shared.  How I had to keep a certain Heisman Trophy winner’s drunken head from falling into his soup in front of Ronald Reagan during dinner. Getting arrested for alligator terrorism in Texas. Getting a VW sized bouquet of flowers from the singer celebrity fountain of too many Bloom County jokes after I crashed a plane. Then finding him on a street to thank him 40 years later. Typical cartoonist stuff.

THE BEAT: You mentioned that you couldn’t find anyone else who had tried this exact model – there are a lot of cartoonists on Patreon, but not quite with this kind of program. After everything you’ve done – being one of the last mega hit comic strips in the print newspaper system, coming back on digital platforms, and now going even more independently financed, how do you think having these kinds of options affects you as a creator? If you were starting out now do you think you would you try for what remains of syndication or just go self published from the start?

BREATHED: Syndication now?  To what?  I’m actually not sure a paper comic page still exists. But building a readership is wholly different than moving it from newspapers to social media and then finally to Patreon.  I’m not sure I’d try the former. 

The new, Patreon-based Bloom County launches on January 12th