Molto Boom Boom

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 

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Mushrooms, Music, and Myopia

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

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Greetings, dear readers.

We're helping a friend celebrate a big birthday this weekend, and hanging with out-of-town visitors, so let's get down to business with a double pipe pic.

An Italian Jazz Pickle asked if I'd share a photo of Sandro Pertini, President of Italy from 1978 to 1985, who's smoking a pipe in nearly every photo I've seen. He also appears as a caricature by Italian cartoonist Andrea Pazienza (1956-1988).

Mille grazie to Paradoxer for the suggestion, and for introducing me to the work of Andrea Pazienza.

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Now, let's revisit this week's Bizarro gags, written and drawn by your Italian-American cartoonist.

These were fun guys to draw.

We've all been there at one time or another.

Wednesday's panel resulted from a half-remembered dream I had a couple of months ago, wherein I was apparently a pipe smoker searching for pipe cleaners. I found some in a drugstore, and while paying the clerk, I said, "I must be the last person in the world who actually uses these to clean a pipe."

The dream wasn't funny, but it got me thinking about how odd it is that these things are still called pipe cleaners, and I hammered it into a gag.

And I just noticed that the first half of the week was an inanimate object hat trick.

Finally, some human characters! The caption (hopefully) suggests the corkscrew structure of DNA.

Contact lenses might be less conspicuous, but our protagonist should have Lasik surgery if he expects to get away with cheating.

Halloween never ends at my house.

That wraps up another week of droll drawings.  

See you next week.

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Bonus Track 

Vinicio Capossela: "Con Una Rosa"

from the album Canzoni A Manovella

I may not understand all of the words, but Caposella's music speaks to me.

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Everyday Surrealism

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

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By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
William Shakespeare's Macbeth

A Halloween tradition in our house is to order from a favorite pizza shop and watch the 1983 film Something Wicked This Way Comes. The script was co-written by Ray Bradbury (and adapted from his novel) and the stellar cast includes Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd, Royal Dano, and Pam Grier. It doesn't actually take place on Halloween or even reference it, but is definitely autumnal and wonderfully creepy.

A new tradition here in Hollywood Gardens is visiting the haunted yard of a young neighbor named Noah. He's a great kid who foregoes trick-or-treating to raise funds for cancer research. We're lucky to have this inspiring lad living nearby.

Pie in the Sky

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

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I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

Terry Gross

A recent comic sent me on a search for quotes about self-deception. I'd hoped to gain some psychological insight regarding people's uncanny ability (or determination) to ignore facts that contradict their chosen narrative.

Along the way, I encountered some wise words from Terry Gross, my NPR dream date. What she describes is probably true for all of us. 

However, there's definitely a segment of the populace who knows that what they claim to believe is objectively false, but will never admit it, because of their own past statements or public actions.

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It's objectively true that we love to include a pipe pic in our blog entries, and will continue to do so as long as quality images keep finding their way to us.

A longtime Bizarro reader and supporter snapped this one at Detroit Urban Artifacts, which looks like a spectacular antique store.

I've seen many photos of pipe-smoking dogs, but this is the first pink ceramic poodle.

Thanks to David D for spotting this pooch and sending us his shot.

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Now, let's peek at the latest Bizarro gags.

Monday's caption is what you might call a mental pun. It works when you look at the printed word, but I can't imagine an appropriate spoken pronunciation. It simply has to resonate in the mind's ear.

It was fun to draw once I decided where to place the mustache.

Would the knitted items in the drawing be considered hats, cozies, or something else altogether?

In recent months, I've done three comics involving piggy banks. (See Example A and Example B). Sometimes ideas come in multiples, and we're grateful when they do.

These three are the belated offspring of a gag I wrote for Bizarro long before becoming the daily cartoonist.

That first one is still my favorite.  

This is the panel that led to my musings about self-delusion. I wrote mongers on the character's sign because theorists lends too much legitimacy to the types of claims that inspired the gag. I propose that we replace the term conspiracy theorist with conspiracy fantasist.

The panel also drew comments from three camps:

• Readers who understood the joke
• People who identified with the character and took offense at the mention of facts
• Self-styled editors who presented corrections ("That should be a tin foil hat," "The word [x] should be [y]," "This would be funnier if...")

One wonders if commenters in that third category would tell a musician that they should've started a song with an E7 chord, or hand them rewritten lyrics.
 

Friday's panel brought your cartoonist great joy. I love wordless gags and especially wordless clown gags.

It warranted a vertical layout in the strip version.

Speaking of converting panels to strips, I'd assumed that Friday's reconfiguration would be a simple task, but proved myself wrong.

Fortunately, I worked it out and learned a little about doing my job as efficiently as I can. I'd initially attempted another vertical strip, but the tomb became too small to read. Returning to landscape orientation, I extended the background greenery and shortened the mic stand. The lines in the reduced art became much thinner, so I filled in the epitaph lettering and added heavier outlines around the monument.

Then I had to decide what to do with the caption. Whether it remained as a single line or split into two lines, the box interfered with the drawing. The tall, multiline caption box now seems an obvious solution, but because I'd been doing things more or less the same way for over five years, discovering it was a bit of a struggle.

Perhaps if I see this comic a few years from now, I'll have a comforting false memory of the strip layout coming together easily.

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Bizarro in the Wild

My dear pal and colleague Jim Horwitz was shopping with his kids at an art supply store in Minnesota and noticed a Bizarro comic displayed near the cash register. It had been carefully clipped from the newspaper, partially hand-colored, and mounted on a piece of mat board, all of which absolutely delights me.

"Jimmy Ho" has written many gags that Dan Piraro turned into Bizarro comics, and he's the creator of the online comic, Watson, which I highly recommend. Watson is funny, goofy, passionate, sincere, smart, sweet, and unique, much like Jimmy himself.

That wraps up another pile of laffs from the Little Shop of Humor in Bizarro Studios North.

Drop by again next Saturday, when I'll have a fresh batch of cartoons and commentary cooked up for you.

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Bonus Track

Pussy Cat: "Ce N'est Pas Une Vie"
RCA Victor (France) 45 rpm, 1966) 

Since we kicked off this batch with a faux-Gallic joke, I have an excuse to share a track by one of my favorite 1960s French yé-yé singers: Évelyne Courtois, who adopted the name Pussy Cat based on the Tom Jones hit, "What's New Pussycat?"

At age 17, Coutrois was the guitarist and songwriter for France's first all-female rock band, Les Petits Souris. She was inspired by the British mod scene, and in addition to original tunes, she covered songs by the Zombies, the Moody Blues, the Hollies, and the Small Faces. "Ce N'est Pas Une Vie" is her version of the Small Faces' "Sha-La-La-La-Lee."

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Exclamatory Inquiry

It's time for another dispatch from Bizarro Studios North. March has come in like a mutant lion-lamb hybrid, and in a couple weeks we'll be resetting our clocks for reasons no one can remember or explain.

This week's bucolic pipe pic comes to us courtesy of faithful Bizarro reader Glenn S. It's a portrait of country music star Dave "Stringbean" Akeman, taken at his home in March, 1962.

Photo: Jack Corn/The Tennessean

Stringbean (1915-1973) was regarded as one of the best claw-hammer banjo players of all time, and had a long career as a musician and comedian before becoming more widely known as a cast member on Hee Haw, a TV variety show featuring music and corny humor. The program ran from 1969 to 1971 on CBS, and in syndication through 1993.

As a star of the Grand Ole Opry, Stringbean exaggerated his gangly appearance with wacky outfits that made him resemble a funhouse mirror image.

Thanks to Glenn for the great photo, and for pointing me toward some excellent music to explore.

That picture of Stringbean on stage makes the human anatomy in my drawings look almost normal. Speaking of which, here's my latest comic output for your review.

Monday's protagonist is either a pastry lover or an arms enthusiast.

 

Another tragic interspecies love story. Just wait till Wolfie whispers, "I'd like to try on your clothing."

On Wednesday, we looked at the mundane side of life in the Marvel universe.

The panel and the strip each contained four secret symbols, but not the same four.

 

Long before adopting his pen name, little Eric Blair created an early draft of one of his best known works, though at the time, he called it Edible Farm. 

 

Our second superhero gag of the week features The Inexplicable Interrobang, a character I'm hoping will spawn a lucrative movie franchise for Bizarro Studios.

 

Inty's costume was pretty much in place in my initial sketch, but the gag felt a little weak. I eventually hit on the job fair idea, which gave me an opportunity to draw a few more imagined crimefighters.

In case you're curious, an interrobang is a punctuation mark combining a question mark and an exclamation point. I thought it was a fitting name for this oddball character.

For Switcheroo Saturday, we presented a sympathetic portrayal of the much-maligned monster under the bed.

And that wraps up another week in Bizarro comics. Thanks again to Glenn S, and other readers who've suggested pipe pics for the blog. I can't guarantee that I'll use every one that comes in, but I appreciate seeing your discoveries.

Don't forget to visit Dan Piraro's blog, where he has more to say about these gags, and whatever else is on his mind this week. His weekly post also features his newest Sunday Bizarro page, which is always a wonder of comic art.

Bonus Track

"Little Snack Bar"
composed by Berto Pisano
from the film Interrabang (1969)

Pisano (1928 - 2002) was an Italian composer, conductor, arranger and jazz musician. The Interrabang soundtrack is the only work of his that was familiar to me. Friday's superhero reminded me that I have the CD in my collection. I hadn't heard it in a long while, and on this listening, "Little Snack Bar" was my favorite selection.

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