Doone at the Crossroads

This post goes up on Saturday, July 6. With luck, Washington DC will have recovered from having to roll out heavy artillery for the amusement of a giant four-year-old.

Let's see what popped up on the comics page since our last update.

Compare and contrast: Body modification and dead body modification.

Gentlemen, let's be honest. We've all been that guy at one time or another.

Here's a cartoon trade secret: When converting a vertical panel comic to a horizontal strip, sometimes it helps to give the dialog to a different character.

Although I always put the strongest gag in the Friday slot, this one turned out to be my favorite of the week.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Paul Stanley, a member of Kiss, tweeted this gag to his 494,000 followers. He even took the time to photograph the strip from an actual newspaper. Mr. Stanley's "Starchild" makeup is parodied in the cartoon, although I'm told he wears the star on his right eye. Kudos to him for having a sense of humor and sharing the cartoon. 

Apologies to anyone who ended up with a Kiss earworm as a result of reading it.

This punishment manages to be both cruel and unusual.

Friday's cartoon plays fast and loose with the legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul at a crossroad in Mississippi and becoming the King of Blues Guitar. In our Bizarro reboot, this poor guy omitted a crucial detail.

Surprisingly, a web search for "Blues Piper" turned up this video of Gunhild Carling, a Swedish multi-instrumentalist. I don't care much for big band swing, but it's interesting to view as an experiment.

Too many people perform this sort of calculation when considering return on investment. My original dialog had the corporate kingpin basing his decision on whether the predicted horrific consequences would affect his grandchildren or later descendants, whom he probably would never meet anyway. That was a little too depressing, though not beyond belief.

On that uplifting note, I'll thank you once again for reading Bizarro, and for visiting the blog. As always, I encourage you to check in on Dan Piraro's weekly post for his thoughts on these cartoons, and a glorious new Sunday page.

Update/Correction
 
Due to a cartoonist malfunction, the signature notation in Saturday's gag incorrectly indicates a total of three Bizarro secret symbols appearing in the panel, when in fact there are four, as highlighted below.

Several sharp-eyed readers pointed out the error, and we hope to get a corrected version up on the King Features website soon. In the interest of historical accuracy, and as a reminder to your cartoonist, we'll keep the erroneous panel here on the blog.

Bonus Track

Rufus Harley, Jr. (1936-2006), was an American musician who played bagpipes in a jazz context, and released his first album, Bagpipe Blues, in 1965.

This amazing video is a 1987 performance of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, with Harley backed by the Sun Ra Arkestra.




The bagpipes are well-suited to this composition, with a sound similar to Coltrane's soprano saxophone on the original recording. Enjoy.