IOWA CITY, Iowa -- You can take 'Bloom County' out of Iowa, but a lot of Iowa will stay in 'Bloom County.'
Cartoonist Berke Breathed, creator of the comic strip 'Bloom County,' which appears in about 700 newspapers, says readers won't notice much difference when Breathed moves to New Mexico later this month.
The desert Southwest will be a big change from the rolling eastern Iowa prairie, but the strip won't be trading in its lush pastures and clear brooks for mountains and gila monsters, Breathed said.
'There won't be a bit of change,' Breathed said. 'Bloom County was invented while I was in Austin, Texas, before we even moved to Iowa. People have associated the rural quality with Iowa, but that's more their conjecture than reality.'
Breathed does throw local Iowa jokes into Bloom County occasionally, and he said that will probably change to local New Mexico jokes.
One of the more notable Iowa-born gags followed University of Iowa football Coach Hayden Fry's remark in calling women 'little dumplings.' Breathed turned that into a presidential crisis by having Ronald Reagan misquoted in The New York Times as calling feminists 'little dumplings.'
