Holy Mackerel

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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Every joke is a tiny revolution. ~George Orwell

It's been one of those weeks when current events are so horrifying that pursuing humor as a profession can feel hollow. Orwell's Newspeak has come truer than he imagined. The group that identifies as pro-life wants to put deadlier murder weapons into more people's hands. So-called conservatives oppose any form of conservation, and "the party of Lincoln" is doing everything possible to maintain and expand codified inequality.

One has to remind oneself that humor communicates ideas. Understanding humor requires thought, and totalitarians fear a thinking populace. We hope that our comical words and pictures provide moments of relief, but also assurances that free thought will persist.

Apologies for the heaviness of this week's introduction, but the country's atmosphere has been particularly toxic, as you well know. I'll try to maintain our usual tone for the rest of this post.

I chose a pipe pic for the week that elevates my mood.

It's a wonderful portrait of jazz musician Doc Cheatham (1905-1997). Cheatham was a devoted disciple of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, whom he described as "an ordinary-extraordinary man."

In the mid-1990s, he recorded a beautiful album with his much younger friend and fellow trumpeter, Nicholas Payton. Their version of "Save It, Pretty Mama," one of Armstrong's signature tunes, is a favorite of mine.

Let's review the week's Bizarro comics, and see if they bring you a chuckle or two.

The drawing of the musician in Monday's panel was based on the late Lemmy Kilmister of the English band Motörhead. The comic isn't specifically about Motörhead or Lemmy, but when I think of heavy metal musicians, he's the default image in my head. Supposedly, Motörhead holds the record for the loudest live performance of any band in history.

The protagonists of Detectorists, a British TV series, inspired the other character. Detectorists is a low-key comedy about rival bands of metal-detecting nerds in rural England. The two main actors are Toby Jones, who you'd recognize from many serious roles, and MacKenzie Crook, who also created and directed the series. It moves at a slow, almost hypnotic pace, and has a uniquely odd style of humor. These characters, which you might initially laugh at (almost looking down on them), turn out to be weirdly endearing and exhibit a quiet dignity. That's an inadequate description, but the best I can do. If you get a chance to check it out, I highly recommend it.

Nothing too fancy on Tuesday, just some medical wordplay.

 

I love to draw classic movie monsters, and I'm always pleased when I come up with a wordless comic, so Wednesday's rumble behind the castle was doubly rewarding.

I believe this is the first time I've published a comic using the trope of a big fish eating a small fish. Most readers probably recognized the literal depiction of a familiar phrase, and others may have detected some commentary on a frequent context for that phrase. The reader can decide if this is a case of ichthyology or, "Ick. Theology."

 

This vendor should consider charging by the foot.

The strip layout works almost as well, despite a small coloring error by the cartoonist.

I'd wager that this isn't the weirdest grant proposal ever submitted.

In order to make all of the Secret Symbols visible in the strip version, I tucked part of the fumetto (word balloon) behind the edge of the desk. I could have made the balloon shorter, but the text needs some space around it for easier reading. I'd just completed a batch of gags playing with speech balloons and thought bubbles, and I believe that freed my thinking to come up with this solution.

That's the latest from your humble cartoonist. Thank you for reading my words and pictures. Please drop by Dan Piraro's blog, too. He has much to say about various topics, and even comments on these very gags.

Also, I invite you to check out my weekly newsletter. It's free, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Each mailing features a sneak peek at a future Bizarro cartoon, and something from my archives.

Bonus Track

XTC, "Melt the Guns"
from the double LP English Settlement
Virgin Records, 1982

 

Thank you, Andy Partridge and XTC.

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