Ivan the Savory

Winter is approaching here at Bizarro Studios North, and we've switched the clocks back to standard time, so please excuse us if we start using brighter colors to try to offset the seasonal gloom and grayness.

Let's take a look at this week's gags, and see if that lifts our spirits.

We kicked off with a typical case of hatchling rivalry. Parenting is tough for every species.

We're constantly second-guessing ourselves here at the studio, and after this cartoon was printed, I wondered if the connection between the words feather and finger would have been conveyed more effectively if we'd used quotation marks as shown above. I think it does work a little better with the added punctuation, but it's already out there in its original form.

Tuesday's panel imagines how the Three Stooges might have gone over in the Elizabethan era.

Lead Stooge Moe Howard credited Pittsburgher Paul Shannon with helping to revive the trio's career in the early 1960s, when he featured Stooge shorts on his afternoon kids' TV show, Adventure Time. Your humble cartoonist's Cub Scout pack once attended an Adventure Time taping. Sadly, I have no photographic evidence of that field trip.

I realized after the fact that this panel's caption also recalls the title Anythynge You Want To: Shakespeare's Lost Comedie, a literate and hilarious recording by the Firesign Theatre.

Apparently Russia meddled with Wednesday's gag involving tinned autocrats. The text on the side of the can is a modified version of сардинкы, the Russian word for sardines. We tweaked it to accommodate the K2 Secret Symbol.

Wednesday was also the birthday of Adolphe Sax, creator of the saxophone. To honor this important date, here's an old WaynoVision panel featuring the sax.

Jake and Will, working on a folkloric masterpiece. 

I swear, this gag was not timed to coincide with any real-life events.

Our last gag of the week is a simple verbal switcheroo. Drawing the pie was easier than working out the math. I checked the totals at least a dozen times before uploading this file.

I often use reference photos to make my drawings less inaccurate, and usually print out collages to look at while I work on the art. These are the pages I made to help with this week's output. 

Yes, those are actual historical tsars in Wednesday's panel, although I've forgotten which ones.

Be sure to visit Dan Piraro's blog, to view his latest widescreen Bizarro Sunday page, and see what he has to say about this batch of cartoons.

Bonus Track

Please enjoy Louis Armstrong's 1954 version of the Russian folk song Очи чёрные, also known popularly as Dark Eyes.
 


Armstrong chose to ignore the original lyrics, which were written by Ukrainian poet Yevhen Hrebinka, but it's still a fine recording by America's greatest musician.