It’s Back to Old Drawing Board

Old cartoon strips don’t die, they just get sketchier, or so it must seem to a legion of fans who will get a new Sunday-only cartoon strip from Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berke Breathed in place of his wildly popular “Bloom County.” Ever since Breathed announced he would be ending the strip and replacing it with the weekly feature, letters have been pouring in from unhappy readers, including a suicide threat (which turned out to be fake) and the announcement by a Massachusetts teen-ager of a grass-roots campaign to keep the cartoon characters alive. “The warmth of those characters was really something, and it’s been an exceptional show of regret that Berke’s ending it,” said Al Leeds, who edits the cartoon strip for the Washington Post Writer’s Group. It was Leeds who signed Breathed to a contract in 1980 and watched the strip, featuring Opus the penguin and the other peculiar residents of a fictional locale, spread to about 800 daily and college newspapers nationwide. The cartoonist’s mail has more than doubled lately, to as many as 250 letters a week, full of pleas from fans such as 13-year-old Eric Gustafson, who has collected about 100 signatures in his campaign to save the strip, ending Aug. 6. “I’m sure ‘Bloom County’ has a lot of fans nationally who are upset, so we’re trying to get something started locally and hope it will spread,” said Eric.

--Czechoslovakian playwright Vaclav Havel, whose jailing this year for human rights activism raised a global outcry, will be awarded the West German Book Trade Assn.’s 1989 peace prize. The prize, worth $12,700, will be awarded at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair on Oct. 15, but Havel likely won’t be there to receive it. “He has no passport, and even if he were given one he would be afraid to go unless he had assurances that he would be allowed back,” said the playwright’s brother, Ivan Havel. Havel, 52, served half of an eight-month prison term on charges arising from demonstrations against Czechoslovakia’s Communist government. He was released May 17 after protests over his sentence.

--First Lady Barbara Bush quietly celebrated her 64th birthday Thursday, saying she “would just as soon not focus” on the event. Nothing special is planned for Monday either, when President Bush turns 65. None of the couple’s children were on hand for Mrs. Bush’s special day, which the First Lady was to spend in part speaking at the commencement for 110 graduates from the General Education Development program at Woodson High School in Washington, where high school dropouts return to receive their degrees.