A Chip Off the Old Brimstone

The weekly review from Bizarro Studios North
 

Monday's wordless gag may have confused readers who get their daily Bizarro fix from newspapers that run the strip version, particularly those printing their comics at the scale of a fortune cookie message. I had trouble seeing it, and I already knew the gag.

It's an odd, transitional era for daily comics. Online readers can see details in the art, and have the option to click to an enlarged image. Newspapers, on the other hand, are running comics at ever-smaller sizes, and the printing process introduces "funk" when color images are converted to halftone dots. Art with fine detail and saturated can start to look muddy, even when magnified.

We keep that in mind, and try to avoid making any important parts of the art too small to decipher on newsprint. It's a balancing act. Perhaps we should start drawing with broad point Sharpies.

Think twice before saying you'd do anything to leave your job. One has to admire this employee's commitment and follow-through. He's hoping for a positive reference when his new employer checks up on his history.

Rex is trying to exploit the common belief about dog years to help with his checkers game. The temporal advantage is probably unnecessary, since he'd just won four consecutive Scrabble games.

Thursday's comic serves as a gentle reminder to check in with your attorney when deciding which giant animal costume to wear at your trial.

A friend commented on Facebook about this cartoon's "multiple levels of insanity." That could become a new plea: Not guilty by reason of multiple levels of insanity." 

My first sketch of this one referred to ladybugs, but we decided that if the beard of insects was red, it would telegraph the gag, and almost make the text redundant. Also, I was too lazy to draw that many ladybugs.

This is a simple gag referring to a common phrase. Our favorite part is the elephant's apprehensive expression. 

The detail above shows a little reward I gave myself. This was the 100th comic I've drawn since I started working on the 2018 dailies. As I complete each inked original, I write a sequence number in the corner of the art board. 

I felt pretty good about this milestone until I realized I had 212 more to go this year.

Last week, we jumped into a new digital stream. There's now a Bizarro channel on Apple News, for those readers with devices on the iOS platform. It's an excellent way to view the comics. The image on your iPhone is probably bigger than the one in your local newspaper.

Be sure to visit Dan Piraro's blog to check his comments on this week's gags, see the latest gorgeous Sunday panel, and shop for Bizarro swag.