Strip Search

Another Saturday, another dispatch from Bizarro Studios North.

As some readers have noted, many of our client newspapers run Bizarro in a horizontal space that would normally accommodate a regular comic strip. So, for every daily panel, we also create a "landscape" version of the gag. This involves repositioning elements, adding or editing line breaks to the dialogue, and creating additional art to fill up the space. It usually takes a half day to do the strip conversions for a week's cartoons. 

Converting this batch of panels presented some interesting challenges, so I'm sharing both versions of each daily. This is probably more than enough "process" talk for most readers, so we won't make it a regular part of the blog.

If my own cats are typical of the species, the smaller the box, the more attractive as a spot to occupy.

I wanted to place the projected image of the contented cat on the far right, so I reversed the orange cat to appear to be speaking to an audience to the reader's left. Shrinking the art made the O2 secret symbol too small to read in print, so I bumped it up a little.

Judging from comments on this gag, our readers love to make jokes about Schrödinger's cat.

Someday Melodramamine will be available over the counter. Until then, sufferers of overemotion sickness are well-equipped to convince their doctors to write a prescription.

This was one of the easier conversions of the week, requiring minimal shuffling and resizing, and a very small amount of additional art.

Halloween is just around the corner, so it's a good time to start a retox program, and there's no better place than your local InvertedStarbucks.

Another fairly simple conversion. The only extra drawing required was some shading in the upper right corner, and cream & sugar on the left. Based on these last two, I've made a mental note to try to keep the dialog in the upper third of the panel whenever possible.

Thursday's gag is grammatically correct, although it sounds wrong. Turning it into a strip was a trick in itself.

The magician's hat made the art a little too vertical, so I removed it and simply drew in his hair. The strip layout also allowed for a full view of the magic boxes.

This isn't really a political statement, but rather a comment on the state of  political discourse. At the risk of sounding like a politician, there is a difference.

Every element in today's comic was tweaked or rearranged in some way. My intermediate Photoshop file had 18 layers at one point.

Saturday's gag reminds us of the importance of speaking clearly.

On rare occasions, the panel and strip configurations will include different secret symbols. We lost a stick of dynamite today, but gained a slice of pie and a (reflected) UFO.

Thanks, as always, for reading Bizarro and checking in on the blog. Next week's post will be less technical.

Each week, Dan Piraro also posts his own cartoon recap, along with the latest always-stunning Sunday Bizarro. You ought to check it out.

Bonus Track of the Week

A beloved Halloween carol, by the Shaggs.