Saturday, July 11, 2026

Gone With the Steam

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 the sunny climes of Hollywood Gardens, PA. 

Your cartoonist's schedule is heavily loaded this week and weekend, so we're going with a to-the-point blog entry today, starting with a vintage magazine ad as our pipe pic.
I stumbled upon this image while searching for something else on eBay. I discovered a seller who lists hundreds of tiny advertisements clipped from old magazines. One wonders if this person found an untapped market or just has a weird hobby.


Maybe one day, Bizarro cartoons snipped from newspapers will be offered for auction. Until then, you can read the latest batch in digital form.

The week kicked off with the latest in our floating sheet-ghost series. Although the art is sparse, every time I do one of these, I spend more time than I expected to on the drawing.

European starlings have lived in North America since the late 1800s, but this particular bird still embraces its roots.

Some sophisticated members of this species are less prone to laughing out loud compared to their unevolved cousins.

Focus groups thought the user instructions were "a little preachy."

Going down with the ship may have been a preferable option.

The cargo pockets come in handy at BYOB restaurants.

Thanks for stopping by. We do this thing every Saturday. If you'd like to be notified when there's a new post, you can subscribe to my free Substack newsletter, where you'll also see a teaser from an upcoming cartoon, samples of my pre-Bizarro art, and whatever else I can jam in there.


Fresh Fashions


The Comics Kingdom Summer Shop has been stocked with an assortment of Bizarro T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, and insulated tumblers. Here's one of our understated Secret Symbol shirts for a sophisticated look.


Bonus Track

Golems of the Red Planet: "Hadrial"
from Masada Surf, 2026


Masada Surf has been in heavy rotation here at Bizarro Studios North. Here's all you need to know, from the band themselves:
GOLEMS OF THE RED PLANET is a 3rd wave surf exploration of John Zorn's MASADA songbooks. But let's back up... In l992-l993, composer John Zorn began composing a series of short melodies written in modes found in Ashkenazi Jewish music - a project he called MASADA. Now, over 25 years later, Zorn has composed 613 of these little ditties - the number of commandments found in the Torah. Each of these compositions is written on half a sheet of staff paper (no more than five staves) and written to be performed by any instrumentation. These pieces have been performed by genres as diverse as piano jazz, string quartet, hardcore, all female acapella, salsa, afrobeat, and many more .... but never SURF! And as many of us know, the best surf music uses middle-eastern scales. So we're exploring this vast songbook of new Jewish music and exploring it in a 3rd wave surf context - in the vein of bands like Man or Astro-Man? or Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. Shalom, motherfuckers!

I'm thrilled to share their music with you and looking forward to seeing them live at the end of the month.



 

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