Saturday, April 11, 2026

Bang Zoom

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 


Happy Saturday, O cherished cartoon community.

I have no pithy intro or inspiring quote to offer today, so I'm skipping ahead to our pipe pic of the week. It's a screen grab from the "Save It For Later" music video by The [English] Beat.


Canadian Bizarro field correspondent Petri V sent the image and noted:
The song came up in the news recently, and I watched the video and found this image of a woman with a pipe looking at an album cover with a friend. From your blog posts, I know that you are more than just a little bit interested in music, so I thought I would share it with you.
The 1982 music video features the band performing at a tiny subterranean club for an audience of blasé hipsters, who are eventually won over by the catchy tune. I'm reasonably certain that the gentleman in the beret is not my partner in comics, Dan Piraro.

Naturally, I had to determine what that album was and found that it was a 1960 compilation of songs by French performer Juliette Gréco, released in the US and Canada.

A tip of the the cocoanut straw porkpie to Petri for the image and for reminding me how much I like that song.

If you're as overwhelmed by current events as your cartoonist, perhaps you'd like to visit this week's cartoons for a few moments of escape.

From the day I wrote this gag until I uploaded the file for publication, I ping-ponged between using "would" and "could" in the dialogue. The difference is subtle, and a case could be made for either word. If we didn't have deadlines, I'd most likely still be wavering.

One imagines that authors would be grateful if this sort of thing were limited to a couple of hours per day.

When sequencing a week of cartoons, I schedule my favorite for Friday, but I now think this gag was the strongest in the batch. I like the drawing, and the joke takes an extra beat or two to land. Also, the panel references a familiar character without showing him or even mentioning the name.

My newsletter for the week goes into detail about formatting the panel and strip versions of this gag, for those interested in the nuts and bolts. It will be published early this afternoon.

In its original 1950s incarnation, kids were expected to use actual potatoes to play with this toy, and the potato was literally just the head.

The plastic facial features and hats were backed with sharp spikes. Potato Head-related injuries must have been common in those days.

Friday's highbrow/lowbrow gag is notable for its reduplicative caption and is based on fuzzy memories of impressionists on variety shows. It seems that phrases such as "It goes something like this" were mandated by the FCC.

The week ends with a play on two meanings of "orientation."

Thanks for dropping by. Come back again next Saturday for another six-pack of pictures with words. 

Please feel free to add your comments. I enjoy hearing from you!

Bonus Track

Todd Rundgren: "Onomatopoeia"
From Hermit of Mink Hollow
Bearsville Records LP, 1978


Rundgren made all of the noises on this album by himself.


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Saturday, April 04, 2026

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sauce

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 

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is oneself.

Clifton Fadiman


I hope you survived April Fools' Day with your dignity and sense of humor intact, and someone pranked you, it was good-natured rather than mean-spirited.

Today's pipe pic is either Dave Meyers or Louis Meyers of the Aces blues band. I've seen another photo of Louis with a pipe, so I'm inclined to believe this is Louis in the photo, but I can't say for sure.

 
The brothers were both guitarists, but Dave eventually switched to electric bass. The four-piece group often backed up well-known blues musicians such as Little Walter, Otis Rush, and Eddie Boyd.

My friend Dave Molter, a musician, journalist, and all-around good egg, sent me the photo, which also included this excerpt from an interview with Dave Meyers:

My brother Louis and I tend to be thought of as cotton-field bluesmen. We really rocked the city. When we started here in the 1940s, it was all about big bands and swing music. We hung out a lot with a guy named Lee Cooper, who played swing. He got us excited about music, told us to get into it, to learn it, and sent us to this department store—Lyon and Healy, it was called—where lots of good teachers left their contact information.


And that's how we started. We practiced scales, learned to play little by little. When the Aces were launched, we were untouchable in Chicago. We were among the very first in town to put pickups on our guitars, in 1945. And we must have been the first here to play Gibsons. I had this old L-5 until a fat lady sat on it. And I was the first guy in town to play electric bass. The first Fender Precision bass that came to town, at the 18th and Halsted store, they passed it to me. They said, "We know you know how to play this, take it and see what you can do with it." After that, the Fender guys came along with the first portable amp we ever saw in Chicago. When I started with that thing, everyone was blown away. I'd strap this damn thing on my back, we'd go, and everywhere I went, I'd make fun of the double bass players. We played against big, big swing bands with horns, and all we had was our guitars and harmonica. We'd smash them right there. The guys were completely blown away. It was something else. Everyone in town was afraid of us.

Thanks to Dave for the photo history lesson. I recommend Dave's Substack column, Handbasket to Hell.

The Secret Symbols are back on the job after a week of sick leave, so let's see if we can find them in the latest cartoons.

I've done six of these "What's Your Jam?" multi-panel gags and have probably squeezed as much as possible from the format.

It's a rare occurrence for 13-year and 17-year cicadas to emerge at the same time, but when it happens, the buzzing is mixed with wisecracks.

I'm generally not a fan of practical jokes, but I usually include a phony symbol count on April Fools' Day. I also try to hide the actual count somewhere in the art.

This cartoon is the 2,577th I've drawn since I started doing the Monday-through-Saturday gags.

My drawing of the orange submarine was based on Chinese deep-sea submersibles that were used for many diving missions around the world.

I wrote and drew this panel in January, weeks before the (current) war in Iran began, and it was not meant as a comment on future events, and I'll refrain from referring to any actual sock puppet in this blog.

What would be worse than working with someone who repeats the same joke every day?


This week, we averaged 3.83 Secret Symbols per day. Not too shabby.


Thanks for dropping by the old blogeroo. See you again next Saturday.

Bonus Track

Bill Ramsey: "Yellow Submarine"
Polydor Records (Germany) single, 1966


Alas, my copy of this single doesn't have the picture sleeve, which is more entertaining than the recording.


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Saturday, March 28, 2026

My Back Pages

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 earth cannot move without music. The earth moves in a certain rhythm, a certain sound, a certain note. When the music stops, the earth will stop, and everything upon it will die.

Sun Ra, Space is the Place


Sun Ra was one of the most prolific recording artists of all time. He released more than 100 albums in his lifetime. That's a conservative estimate. I have around forty Sun Ra discs in my music library, and I revisit them regularly.

Ra left the earthly plane in 1993 at age 79, and multi-instrumentalist Marshall Allen, who will soon be 102, continues to lead the Sun Ra Arkestra. 

I usually listen to music while working, and I believe that live music is beneficial to one's well-being, so Sun Ra's words resonate with me. 

This month, I attended three terrific musical performances. On March 3, I saw Jonathan Richman, and more recently, two great shows at a favorite venue, The Original Pittsburgh Winery: The Town Pants, a Celtic/Roots/Rock band from Canada, and the Rebirth Brass Band from New Orleans.

After spending a good part of my adult life in loud clubs, in the audience, and sometimes onstage, I now have some hearing loss. It's not bad enough to require hearing aids, but I'm protective of what remains. Jonathan Richman's show was minimally amplified, so I didn't wear hearing protection that night.

I have earplugs with three sets of filters for different levels of noise reduction. At the Town Pants show, I realized I was wearing the strongest filters, which I used when running a snow blower. The show sounded a bit muffled, but we still had a great time.

Do yourself a favor and check out some live music. Even if it's not something you'd normally listen to at home, it's always worthwhile to hear accomplished players who do it every day.

Today's pipe pic is a portrait of Chinese cartoonist Hua Junwu, whom I learned about from Richard G's informative blog, Who's Out There?


A digital version of Chinese Satire and Humor, a collection of Hua's cartoons, is available here. 

The cartoons I've seen are funny and satirical, and it seems his sharp humor was tempered by a friendly drawing style and beautiful brushwork.

Many of his cartoons are wordless with only a short title, and they translate well. Big thanks to Richard for introducing me to Hua's work.


This week's Bizarro gags might look rather odd, in part because there are almost no Secret Symbols. In early January, the symbols took a week of sick leave, and they're almost totally absent in this batch. Since then, they've been working at full strength.

This one reminds me of my days at a series of normal office jobs.

If the art looks different, it's because I did this week's gags in 2011, when I filled in for Dan Piraro as guest cartoonist. I inked with a heavier line than I do today. At that time, I was also assisting Dan by coloring his black-and-white art, and I used his more elaborate shading technique.

When the Secret Symbols were fighting off that virus, they passed it on to me—we work in a small studio space—and while I recovered, we pulled this batch of gags out of the storage unit.

Fifteen years ago, felonious fashion was a thing.

The Bunny of Exuberance was the last symbol to be knocked out by the illness. Apparently, an all-carrot diet provided some immunity.

I don't think I'd cram as many words into one panel today, and I hope I wouldn't be as snarky.


Clowns in one of my gags? Shocking.


This wasn't meant as a political statement in 2011. I'm not sure how it will be received today, but the online comments will let us know soon enough.


Thanks for indulging me while I recovered three months ago. We'll be back next week with new, improved gags, and the usual complement of Secret Symbols.

Bonus Track

Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns
"Would You Believe It? (I have a Cold)"
Ace Records single, 1959


This is a lesser-known Huey Smith song, with a great vocal by Bobby Marchan.


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Saturday, March 21, 2026

Nurture, Nature, or Nomenclature?

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 

Simplicity shows respect for the viewer. You don’t give them more than what the mind needs, nor less than what the eye deserves.

R.O. Blechman


R.O. (Bob) Blechman, born in 1930, has done just about everything an artist might aspire to. The Norman Rockwell Museum describes him as "a celebrated illustrator, animator, children’s book author, graphic novelist, and editorial cartoonist."

Blechman elegantly expresses the balance cartoonists try to achieve. Here at Bizarro Studios, the gag itself is always the reason for the panel to exist, but we also throw in some of our Secret Symbols, those little Easter eggs that many of our readers have come to expect. 

It's easy to get carried away with superfluous details, which can distract readers from the joke, but the art must contain enough visual information to make the setup recognizable. 

Sometimes I think I've hit the mark, but just as often, I worry I've gone too far in one direction or the other. Second-guessing is probably integral to the artist's psyche, and all we can do is try our best every day. 

Thankfully, we have deadlines, so we can't fuss over a gag too awfully long.

Regarding Mr. Blechman, you may not know his name, but you've likely seen his work in some form His animated Christmas greeting for CBS Television has remained popular since it was first aired in 1966, and in a 2018 interview with J.J. Sedelmaier, Blechman said, "People introduce me as the guy who did the [1967] Alka-Seltzer spot, isn't that interesting?"

Hats off to R.O. Blechman for his long and influential career and his many well-deserved awards.
Today's pipe pic, found online, is a vintage print advertisement for Old Briar tobacco.

The ad makes not-so-subtle suggestive claims about the product. If the copy doesn't get their point across, the before-and-after photos make the message clear.

I sincerely hope that the latest Bizarro gags give your mind what it needs and your eyes what they deserve.

A few readers told me that the Disney characters Dopey and Goofy were originally named Deafy and Dippy Dawg. There's plenty of confirmation available about Dippy, but the Deafy claim is mistaken. 

In 2016, The Guardian reported on an auction of Disney art featuring proposed character sketches for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The animation team had brainstormed around fifty names, and the art included a Deafy, but there was also a Dopey. They were two separate characters, one of which was rejected. AI search results hallucinate the "originally named" story. 

Some other rejected names were Jumpy, Dizzey, Hickey, Wheezy, Baldy, Gabby, Nifty, Sniffy, Swift, Lazy, Puffy, Stuffy, Tubby, Shorty, and Burpy.

Remember, you can't always trust AI's answers. Don't be like Hasty (another rejected dwarf).

I usually don't add human features to inanimate objects, but I broke my rule with this skeptical sausage.


"But we'd have to split the money four ways."


Some gags almost write themselves.


Friday's panel depicts a small, but very real subset of collector culture.

One of the Secret Symbols in this panel is difficult to recognize, so if you only find four, you may still give yourself a score of a hundred percent.

Thanks for checking in. See you in a week with more kooky quadrilaterals.

Bonus Track

Ringo Starr & Herb Alpert:
"When You Wish Upon a Star"
from Stay Awake
A&M Records, 1988



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