Flipping through my copy of Billy and the Boingers Bootleg (thank you, Harvard Bookstore basement!), I ran across a plotline in which the Anxiety Closet offers up a vision of Michael Binkley as he’d be in twenty years. I checked the book’s publication date and, yep, “Billy and the Boingers” was printed in 1987. So what did old Berke Breathed predict would be in store for 2007?*
Prediction: Binkley will be balding, married to Lizzie “the Lizzard” Blanchard, and has a daughter.
Reality: In fact, Binkley became a eunuch Tibetan monk after a disaterous first kiss.
Prediction: “Dolly Parton” and “Rambo” will be popular names for daughters and dogs, respectively.
Reality: Dolly who?
Prediction: Bruce Springsteen would be President.
Reality: Could that be worse that what did happen?
I wonder if Breathed himself could have guessed that in 2007 he’d be putting out a beautiful, if somewhat retro-quaint, Sunday-only strip.
* The strip itself ran in the papers before its republication in book form. Details, details.
