Copycat Crime

This is the regular dispatch from Bizarro Studios North, where I 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.

Wayno

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Inspiration has always been born of recombination.
Gary Panter

Greetings once again from Hollywood Gardens, PA, the home of Bizarro Studios North. The above quote is taken from Gary Panter's 1980 essay, The Rozz-Tox Manifesto. I first encountered Rozz-Tox in a Ralph Records mail order catalog, and subsequently reprinted it (with Panter's permission) in Shake & Pop!, a music zine I co-published at the time.

We've talked about originality, inspiration, and creativity on the blog in the past, and will touch on them again today, but not before the traditional sharing of a pipe pic.

This one is a drawing by my Bizarro partner Dan Piraro, from his brilliant ongoing graphic novel, Peyote Cowboy.

PeyCow is a surreal adventure in a magical version of the old west. The artwork is brilliant, and the storyline is fascinating and original. 

I didn't tell him I was using a clip from Peyote Cowboy as this week's pipe pic, but I'm pretty sure he won't mind.

Now that we've set an unattainably high artistic bar with Dan's art, let's plummet back to Earth with a look at my recent comics.

I enjoy drawing pirates as much as clowns, cowhands, and cave dwellers, but need to find a synonym for "pirate" that begins with the letter c.

I must confess to taking a bit of pride in placing the O2 Secret Symbol on the captain's log document.

I've done a fair number of gags featuring floating ghosts draped with a sheet. Every time, I imagine it being one I can draw quickly, and then spend more time on it than any other panel for the week. In this case, I kept tweaking the pattern on the bandana.

Wednesday's comic raises the topics of originality and inspiration, with a reference to pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, who famously made paintings that were meticulously copied from comic book panels. Lichtenstein reproduced the work of poorly-paid, living artists while he became wealthy off their appropriated images.

In a 2007 interview, Art Spiegelman commented," Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup."

Russ Heath (1926-2018) created many of the panels that Lichtenstein copied for his paintings, and struggled financially throughout his life. In 2014, Heath did a comic about being a source for Lichtenstein's art, and some financial help he received from an organization called the Hero Initiative.

One can understand, appreciate, and support the concept of transformative fair use, which involves using an original work for purposes of criticism, satire, or education, or that builds upon the previous work, but it can at times be murky and ambiguous. 

If I were Russ Heath, I'd have hated Lichtenstein's guts, too.

For my comic, I researched photos of Lichtenstein to try to capture what he may have looked like as a young child. I found an early photo to work from, and was fairly happy with the result.

This reminded me of a page I created in 1993 for Heavy Metal magazine. I played with the idea of fine art created from "low" art, with a fictionalized version of myself as an unsuspecting outsider whose work inspired well known artists.

I used Howie Patterson, a character from my self-published minicomix as the subject of four imagined paintings.

The pieces parodied the art of (clockwise from top left) Andy Warhol, Mary Fleener (a good friend and a great cartoonist), Keith Haring, and Robert Williams. 

Click on the images for a closer view of the page and the introductory text.

The Heavy Metal page was a reversal of minicomix I published under the title Mondo Howie, where I invited fellow cartoonists to draw their own versions of the character.

This page was done by Michael Roden (1952-2007), a prolific minicomix artist, and one of my old self-publishing pals.

As someone who often uses pop culture references and familiar characters and images as comic fodder, I try to follow the legal and ethical guidelines of transformative fair use. I'm also constantly amazed (and angered) by the outright theft of cartoons all over the web, enabled by digital technology and the enormity of the internet.

With that extensive digression aside, we return to our usual review of the week in Bizarro.

That lowercase anarchy symbol is a dead giveaway.

This is what's known as "dropping knowledge."

Also, I know that lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs en masse. It's a familiar myth, and serves as a handy metaphor for some aspects of human behavior.

This batch concludes with my latest inanimate object comic, and a reminder that inside, we're all the same.

That's a wrap for this week, amigos. We'll be back next Saturday with more words about words and pictures. I recommend visiting Dan Piraro's blog, where he shares his latest Sunday Bizarro page, and interesting thoughts on other topics. 

You might also consider subscribing to my free newsletter, where I always preview an upcoming gag, along with a piece of art or design from my files.

Bonus Track

The Jam - "Pop Art Poem"
 

"Pop Art Poem" was originally released in February 1981, as a floppy record attached to a British magazine called Flexipop.

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