THE COMICS

When Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berke Breathed introduced a fundamentalist named Edith Dreck into his popular strip, “Bloom County” in June, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, chairman of the National Federation for Decency, learned that dreck can mean excrement in Yiddish and charged the artist with “religious hatred.” Breathed dismissed the complaint, saying he hadn’t known the Yiddish meaning. (In English, the term means trash or rubbish .) Nonetheless, the cartoonist has changed the character’s name to Edith Drock in the new “Bloom County” anthology, “Tales Too Ticklish to Tell.” But not as a result of fundamentalist pressure, Breathed says. “No one would believe it was not a deliberate word play,” he said. “From a humor standpoint, I think it would have been a stupid thing to do purposely. I was just looking for an ugly name for the character.”