Trust No One

This is the weekly communiqué from Bizarro Studios North, where I (Wayno®) have been writing and drawing the Monday through Saturday Bizarro comics since 2018. My partner and friend, Dan Piraro, who created Bizarro in the late twentieth century, continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.

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I hope you survived April Fools' Day without sitting on a whoopee cushion, getting joy-buzzed, or lighting an exploding cigar. I slipped a little trick into the April 1 panel, but explain it fully in today's post.

Last week, we opened with a double pipe pic of artist M.C. Escher. We're topping that with this violent triptych from a 1960s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents comic book.

A respectful tip of the fedora to longtime FOB (Friend of Bizarro) Steve D for the scan of this wonderful sequence from a mostly-forgotten comic book series.

 

The superhero team's acronym stood for "The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves," and some issues featured art by the great Wally Wood. I have no idea who created the art shown here, but I'm delighted that Steve found it and sent it our way.

Without further introduction, we present a review of the week's comics. No fooling.

This caption is a form of adjacent metathesis, or the interchange of two phonemes within a word. 

 

Adjacent metathesis often appears as a nonsensical mispronunciation, such as "foilage" for "foliage." It's something I've used as a punch line in the past, as in this panel, but with the interchange producing an actual word rather than a meaningless misspelling. 

 

I'd never considered this type of construction to be a pun exactly, and recently tried to find a name for it, eventually discovering adjacent (or local) metathesis. I now happily share that bit of useless knowledge with you.

To fill up the strip layout, my original art included the elephant and the makeup counter as separate images, although neither appears in full in either configuration.

Sometimes, I remember to make the strip conversion a little easier.

An online reader said that our pale pachyderm should apply blush sparingly, or risk being mistaken for a pink elephant. After reading that comment, I recalled this old commercial, and had the song stuck in my head for a day or so.

 

 

 

If you have ever wondered how a kangaroo might sit on furniture designed for humans, it's probably not as shown in this illustration.

 

This was known as the Deepbreathing Horizon disaster.

 

Remember, Big Mother is watching you.
 

For April Fools' Day, we paid tribute to a classic TV series, and employed adjacent metathesis for a second time in one week. In the spirit of the holiday, I placed a bogus Secret Symbol tally in the signature, but added the actual total as the calendar page tacked to the wall.

The number 1,332 was a joke, but it wasn't a random choice.

Each of my original drawings for Bizarro is marked with a sequence number, and this was number 1,332. As you can see from the date stamp, I was working on Christmas Eve. Call me Cratchit.

 

"Improbable," a favorite X-Files episode, originally aired in April of 2002, and starred Burt Reynolds as God. The soundtrack included several terrific songs by Karl Zéro, which contributed to the episode's eccentric atmosphere. Also, it features a criminal improbably named Wayno, which creeped me out the first time I watched it.

 

We wrapped up the week with another animal-themed gag, in a familiar Bizarro setting. I may have written this while thinking about the change to Daylight Saving Time.

 

Fun With Infringement

 

A fellow cartoonist shared this altered Bizarro comic on his Facebook page, without realizing that it had been tampered with.

As soon as I notified him, he removed it, which helped maintain my faith in my colleagues. However, I was disheartened that he thought I'd written such clumsy dialog. I found a few other copies of this on FB, and had them removed for violation of intellectual property. 

 

I'm intrigued and baffled by the name Mark Christopher in the bottom left corner, and welcome any information on the source of this theft.

Here's the original cartoon for comparison.

 

By the way, I have no beef with banjos, bagpipes, or accordions. Stealing and altering cartoons is another matter.

That's all for this week from Bizarro Studios North. As always, I thank you for stopping by, and again send my gratitude to Steve D for the Noman comic book scan. Don't forget to check out Dan Piraro's blog for his thoughts on the week's cartoons, and to see his latest magnificent Sunday Bizarro. 

 

See you next week, with more words and pictures. If you'd like to be notified when a new blog entry is posted, you might like to subscribe to my newsletter. Each newsletter includes an exclusive peek at an upcoming Bizarro gag, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Bonus Track

Clifton Chenier
"Zydeco Sant Pas Sale''
Live, 1969

 

If that bastardized comic panel hadn't turned up, prompting me to write about accordions, I might not have found this terrific video of the great Clifton Chenier, so that's something of a silver lining.

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