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
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.
A Barrelful of Bizarro Bric-a-Brac
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's still free, we encourage you to explore the following links.
Your weekly PipePic gave me a flashback to 2004 when we were helping raise funds for a local public library. They had hundreds of old magazine issues (1890s-1940s) in their archives gathering dust so we asked if we could sell them on the new-fangled Ebay. They agreed and the issues went like hotcakes to resellers who did just what you said: clipped the vintage ads and sold them as framed art. We raised nearly $10,000 for the library that year!
ReplyDeleteThat's really interesting, Dave! Who knew?
DeleteThanks for suporting your local library. I'm a big believer in libraries as a vital part of every community.
The Surf Masada was certainly interesting. The final chord didn't resolve so that bothered me a bit.
ReplyDeleteI Think We're All Bozos on This Raft
ReplyDeleteDavid:
DeleteYou may already BE there.
Those of us of a certain age remember using typewriters that had no key for the numeral "1". We'd use a lower case "L" instead. I recognized that immediately in the Masada Surf description. Sure enough, when I went to their website, the text is styled like it came from an old typewriter. It won't be too much longer before this arcane piece of knowledge shared by me and that web page author is lost to the passage of time.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to listening to this when it's not 4am and my wife and dogs are all asleep.