Berke Breathed was a 'Pulitzer prize-winning' cartoonist who did a comic strip called Bloom County, blatantly ripped off from Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau. I'm not sure which one of these men this episode of Murder She Wrote might be based on, but my guess is Breathed.
Whereas Doonsebury did possess humor and political knowledge and deadpan Charlie Brown deliveries, Bloom County strived too hard to be funny. At its worst, it WAS funny, but that was hardly most of the time.
So here we have Fierstein as a cartoonist and someone is submitting doctored comic strips of his, implicating obvious figures in various scandals.
Jessica herself is portrayed as an accuser of sorts.
It took a while to figure out what exactly was going on, as in the span of an hour program, the ramifications had to be established rather quickly, making Jessica appear rather blustery.
People (very strangely) went to her asking why she was making these accusations in the comic strip for which she had nothing to do.
Amazing to think of gangstah rappers doing the same thing in hip-hop songs and they are considered societally inferior.
As I said, it takes a while to follow the charges of slander and how upset people can get. Then there is a murder and the show is back to its usual pace.
Definitely an intriguingly different episode, with Fierstein as a many-times-married cartoonist and Susan Kellermann (Latka's mother on Taxi) as the policewoman.
And how did things go in the real life version with Berke Breathed? He won a Pulitzer and eventually just vanished, while Trudeau's Doonesbury is still running today.