This is the weekly 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 created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.
Wayno
Hello from the Little Shop of Humor in Hollywood Gardens, PA. We're still sweltering here, and your cartoonist is currently juggling a few too many metaphorical balls, so I'll spare you a lengthy intro this time around.
Bizarro buddy Gerry J. from the City of Missed Left Turns (also known as Albuquerque, NM) had the presence of mind to grab today's pipe pic from his television screen back in February.
Thanks to Gerry for the fun image. Could you also send me some temperatures from February?
Let's see if the latest Bizarro gags can help moderate the heat dome...
The section on due process should probably use stick figures to help members of certain quarters grasp the concept.
I reversed the staging for the strip layout, which allowed me to place the word balloon and caption box on the same end of the composition. Otherwise, there would have been no room for the characters.
Microsoft's "Clippy" is afraid of showing his age.
Wednesday's gag is for my brother M., who retired from a long career in research and development, and recently assumed new responsibilities as president of his local bocce league. They play by more traditional rules. That includes a bottle of grappa at each game, doesn't it?
I also reversed this one for the strip layout, which gives it a slightly different feel and, I think, an extra measure of absurdity. Plus, I had room to show the pallino.
Sometimes, transcendence comes with a cup of coffee. I like to imagine that Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead occupies a nearby stool.
Greek mythology meets modern technology. Fortunately, Medusa only has a free Zoom account. Unfortunately, that still means she can fossilize up to 99 participants.
This is what happens when your psychologist has a minor in existentialist philosophy.
That's our blog for Week 26. We're halfway through the year!
I hope you'll return next week for a new batch of gags and commentary.
Bonus Track
The Beach Boys: "Pet Sounds"
From the Pet Sounds album Capitol Records, 1966
Brian Wilson, the troubled genius behind the Beach Boys, died a couple of weeks ago, and I've had this composition of his in my head off and on since I first heard the news.
Wilson is the only member of the band who performs on the song, playing grand piano and accompanied by some of the ace musicians who came to be known as the Wrecking Crew. Wilson originally wrote it in the hope that it would be used as a theme for a James Bond movie.
Much More Bizarro Madness
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore the following links.
This is the weekly 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 created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.
Wayno
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
Igor Stravinsky
During a recent presentation I gave about the day-to-day work of producing six cartoons a week for the past seven-plus years, someone asked how long it takes to write and draw a gag.
That's tricky. Drawing time can be estimated, as it's accomplished physically, but I can't quantify how long it takes to write a gag. I said something like, "In a way, the writing happens all the time." Not as elegantly as Stravinsky might have put it.
Each weekly batch begins with a "writing day," when I make rough sketches of at least six gags to draw as finished panels. In reality, I had been scribbling words, phrases, or doodles in my sketchbook for days or even weeks before tightening them up into usable material. Any number of things can be the seed of a cartoon: a bit of overheard conversation, a word that pops up in a puzzle, an unconscious scribble made during a phone call, even a typo in an email.
Long before I begin the sketching phase, my brain tinkers with those kernels of ideas in the background. It's as if the conscious mind did some initial sorting and told the unconscious, "Here are a few that have possibilities. See what you can do with them."
No doubt this is more the result of skills gained through practice rather than anything mystical, but it's fascinating to step back and think about how humans create.
Igor could have been referring to any type of creative work. I'd love to know what seeds led to him composing The Rite of Spring, which reportedly set off a riot among the audience when it premiered in 1913.
Today's pipe pic is a jaunty nutcracker fisherman (or is it a fisherman nutcracker?) sent to us by Bizarro reader Larry B. of Beverly Farms, MA.
Larry wrote:
Just a little nutcracker from my ever-burgeoning collection. It’s displayed every Xmas in our home.
Thanks to Larry for sharing this charming photo.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the latest Bizarro panels sparked a riot.
My beloved Italian grandma had plastic slipcovers on the furniture in her living room, along with plastic floor runners so you didn't have to step on the carpeting. She also had a plastic-free "front room," where we played games, watched TV, and enjoyed the wonderful aromas of the food she prepared in the nearby kitchen. I'm sure many friends have similar fond memories of their immigrant elders.
It works every time. They just can't resist turning that crank.
Wednesday's panel was the rare gag that was fully formed when I first thought of it. Each successive "Z" should be read a little quieter than its predecessor.
The strip version presents the image to the reader first, followed by the nested balloons. Both layouts work, but in slightly different ways.
Wolfie was ready to retire before he turned six.
I often search for reference images when drawing specific items or people, and this one was no exception. Here are the pictures I studied when drawing the panel:
Oil painting (1767) of young Mozart by Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni
A 1775 portrait of Anna Maria Mozart by Rosa Hagenauer
Mozart's childhood home in Salzburg
An 18th-century child's wagon
I overdid the homework on this one, but it's my idea of fun.
Friday's panel is the latest example of a verbal construction I refer to as a streptonym. After fourteen years, I'm still waiting for the term to catch on.
This caption might have been inspired by a typo or an errant autocorrection.
That's our blog for Week 25 of 2025. Drop by next Saturday for another six-pack of cartoon fun.
Bonus Track
Jane Aire & the Belvederes: "Yankee Wheels"
Stiff Records 45 BUY26, 1978
"Yankee Wheels," which was recorded by Akron's Jane Aire and written by Akron's Liam Sternberg. It doesn't feel like summer until I spin this old favorite.
Alternate Bizarro Outposts
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore the following links.
This is the weekly 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 created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.
Wayno
I had my first serious encounter with AI thievery this week, in a smaller echo of the recent wholesale counterfeiting of multiple editorial cartoonists.
A sharp-eyed reader contacted Dan Piraro to alert us to an online ad for a plumbing company in Louisiana. The ad used one of my Bizarro gags, that had been fed into some AI platform and redrawn in a bland, soulless style, with no accreditation to the original source. The colors and staging were the same as my original panel, and the dialogue was identical. It was clearly a copy.
We brought the fakery to the attention of our editors at King Features and they forwarded it to the appropriate legal watchdogs. Apparently, they did their job, because the bogus Bizarro cartoon has disappeared, at least from the place where we saw it.
Coincidentally, the topic of using AI to "assist" artists came up recently on the local illustrators' group's online forum. A member had fed a photo of a painting in progress to an AI platform to see how it would describe the work.
I was among the respondents, and did my best to articulate my disdain for doing anything to further enable the harvesting of human creativity.
Colleagues, please think twice before inputting anything you created into an AI app. Everything you feed it is used for its "training."
I just learned about someone who prompted AI to "redraw" one of my cartoons and used it as an ad for their business. It's definitely copied from my work but dumbed down into a bland, generic "style." With no accreditation, of course.
I'd share the two images for you to compare them side-by-side, but that would only spread more copies of the counterfeit. Feeding any AI platform work that you created, even once, just out of curiosity, is harmful to yourself and your peers.
Beyond its ability to facilitate theft from artists, AI is a serious environmental threat due to its insane energy requirements.
Sorry to get all lecture-y. I realize that a lot of AI is nearly unavoidable since it's embedded in almost everything we use. I don't mean to be a scold, but it's coming after all of us, and I hope we don't put out the welcome mat for it!
Here's a well-reasoned essay on the topic that does a much better job than I could. And it was written by a human.
Multiple members of the forum offered their opinions in a lively and respectful discussion on the topic. One participant seemed a little too defensive about resisting AI, which made me wonder how much they might be relying on it to assist or enhance their work. But I'm of a naturally suspicious nature, so who knows.
No doubt the debate will continue for a long time to come, assuming the world isn't burnt to a lump of smoldering coal in the near future.
Today's historical pipe pic comes to us from a Bizarro reader from Nipomo, CA (the same location as last week's contributor!)
I'll leave it to our correspondent to elaborate:
My grandfather, D. H.WulzenJr., was a pharmacist in San Francisco who became interested in photography beginning about 1897. He left over a thousand glass plate negatives when he passed, and my father (who became a commercial photographer) spent considerable time in his later years making prints and donating the best work to various collections.
The original plate of this shot now resides in the San Francisco Historical Society collections at the SF Public Library. Like his acquaintance, Arnold Genthe, DHW spent time in SF's Chinatown and took many memorable photos of the people and built environment.
The man pictured here is probably taking a break from his work in the basement restaurant that is behind him. The SF library mentions that this is an opium pipe, but [that is] not so, as opium pipes have different unique characteristics. This is just a guy on his smoke break. We don't have a specific date on this one, but all of the Chinatown photos were taken in 1900 and 1901, so [it was] well before the 1906 earthquake and fire.
Thanks for the fascinating backstory to this museum-worthy photo.
I was recently approached by a company that sells CBD gummies named after a famous stoner comedy duo, and offered a "social media collaboration opportunity" to promote their product on my Insta in exchange for some chewable samples.
Unfortunately, my system can't handle CBD (and forget about THC), so I declined, and, as always, these gags were created by a human cartoonist, without the influence of artificial intelligence or drugs.
Best of all, the pharmacy the fills the prescription accepts Monopoly money.
A colleague who saw this cartoon asked me what cursive sounds like, and I can't stop wondering about it myself.
When the criminals were arrested, Variety's agricultural edition ran the headline, Fake Fungi Fools Farmstand Frequenters.
Thursday's panel was almost a Tarzan gag captioned Man of the Loincloth, but I came to my senses.
Bizarro celebrated Father's Day a bit early this year.
The week ended with that beloved Italian cartoon character, Prosciutto Porco.
Thanks for reading this far down into the post. You're almost done, and I appreciate your eyeballs. See you next week with more visual and verbal shenanigans.
Bonus Track
Groucho Marx: "Father's Day"
Decca Records, 1957
Happy Father's Day to all the dads reading the blog, whether your children are human, feline, canine, or otherwise.
A Bounty of Bizarro Bits & Bobs
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore the following links.
This is the weekly 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 created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.
Wayno
Greetings from steamy Hollywood Gardens, PA. Summer weather finally arrived in the greater Pittsburgh area, and unconfirmed reports suggest that your cartoonist might actually have worn short pants once or twice (but only inside the house).
Due to the aftereffects of heat-induced sleep deprivation, I'm cutting the intro short and jumping ahead to a groovy pipe pic. It's a 1965 shot of the late American soul singer Fontella Bass, looking determined and defiant.
John C., a faithful Bizarro reader from Nipomo, California, spotted the photo on a British music magazine's website and sent it my way.
A tip of the Bizarro stingy-brim to John C. for sharing such a cool photo with us.
In case you're wondering, I was appropriately attired when drawing the latest Bizarro panels.
Visit your favorite online retailer and search for "Items that seem spectacular at first but blow up in an ironic and often tragic manner."
"Also, your résumé says you're only available twelve nights per year."
A possible future for medical research in the US.
There is such a thing as overcompliance.
Friday's panel plays with the visual vocabulary of cartoons, something we enjoy doing from time to time. In 2022, I did a whole week of gags that treated speech balloons and thought bubbles as physical objects visible to the characters in the panels. In that week's blog post, I referred to Mort Walker's 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana, which defines and names many of the graphic devices used by cartoonists.
The Lexicon has been out of print for years and used copies often sell for big money, but I've heard that a new edition is being released later this year. I think that Bizarro readers would enjoy it.
During the 1967-1968 season, Star Trek experimented with product placement in an episode that was never aired. We were happy to recreate it for you.
Thanks for visiting the old blogeroo. We'll be back in seven days with another fresh batch of words and pictures.
Bonus Track
Fontella Bass: "Rescue Me"
Checker Records, 1965
Ms. Bass sang quite powerfully for a pipe-smoker. Her 1965 single on the Checker Records label topped the R&B charts for four weeks. Although it was composed and recorded in Chicago, the tune gives Motown a run for its money.
A Cabinet of Bizarro Curiosities
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore the following links.
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