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
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.
Plato
Several hours after posting last Saturday's blog entry, we went out to hear live music at our favorite Pittsburgh venue, which had been closed for seven years for upgrades and renovations. Water Seed, an energetic seven-piece band from New Orleans, played a blistering two-hour set of their Future Funk, which had everyone in the house up and grooving, including a certain aging punk/jazzbo cartoonist who should never dance in public.
If you have an opportunity to hear Water Seed, do not miss them. Their current single, "Face in the Crowd (Are You Ready?)" is closing in on a million views on YouTube.
Today's pipe pic is a creepy portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, and the subject of a hugely successful movie currently playing.
We're running this photo because we've been unable to find a picture of Barbie smoking a pipe.
Thanks to longtime FoB Andréa D for sharing the image.
Now, let's take a peek at the latest Bizarro gags.
Woodchucks are known for their politeness when making a request.
Is it cheating if a cartoonist thinks of an egregious pun, but undercuts it with a winking caption?
I've been told that McDonald's retired the Ronald character in 2016, but in fact, he still appears at live events and on social media, rather than in advertising.
The dialog in this gag even made me a little squeamish.
I suppose I could have used Mayor McCheese instead, but his head would've occupied most of the available space in the panel.
Admittedly, I know very little about sports, but I'm happy to use them as a metaphor for corporate America.
Friday's gag may be silly on the surface, but it does have a point of view. Last year we planted carrot seeds in our backyard garden, and I learned what baby carrots actually look like. More accurately, the image on the far right is a seedling. Actual baby carrots look like small, squat "adult" carrots. The products often marketed as baby carrots are full-size carrots that have been cut into two-inch lengths and abraded to smooth their ends and polish their surfaces. I imagine the process involves a giant rock tumbler machine.
This food marketing practice mirrors the effects of human beauty standards as evidenced by the rock tumbler effect of Instagram photo filters.
I'm pretty sure I heard that talk therapy was practiced in eighteenth-century France.
Thank you for dropping by the old bloggery station. Your comments are always welcome. See you again next week.
Bonus Track
King Floyd, "Groove Me" Malaco Records single, 1970
Since we're still in heatwave mode, I'm sharing another song that feels like summer to me, by New Orleans soul singer King Floyd. And, yes, that was his actual name.
"Groove Me" made the national top ten, and I remember hearing it often as a kid. When I listen to it today, I'm knocked out by the bass playing of Vernie Robbins through the entire tune.
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
Don't reach out all the way to the reader—don't worry about being "obscure" or "ambiguous or "weird”—if you're sure of what you're doing, ask the reader to do a little work and meet you halfway.
Bill Griffith: Griffy's Top 40 on Comics and Their Creation
Bill Griffith is one of the greatest cartoonists of all time. His character Zippy the Pinhead has delighted and baffled readers for more than fifty years, and has been the funniest and unlikeliest syndicated comic strip since 1986.
Along with many of my colleagues, I often consult Bill's top forty rules on comics and their creation. Number 32, quoted above, is one I do my best to honor since Bizarro's readers are generally quite literate and don't need to be talked down to.
Rule Number 40 is another favorite:
Last but not least: never listen to anyone else's advice on cartooning.
Bill is one of five finalists for the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award as 2022's Cartoonist of the Year, and his work is certainly deserving. I'll be attending the Reuben Award Weekend in September, and look forward to congratulating him on his nomination.
One of my proudest moments at the Reubens was a few years ago when I greeted Bill and he said it was good to see a fellow weirdo.
Today's pipe pic was captured from a TV screen by longtime FoB Steve D.
It's a frame from a 1950 Three Stooges short, Love at First Bite.
Thanks to Steve for the shot.
Following are this week’s Bizarro gags. Let's review to see if we violated any of Griffy's rules.
Initially, I had some difficulty laying out Monday's panel. I couldn't find a way to show the "tails" of the word balloons without crowding the frame and placing some of them behind others. I finally decided to drop them, which worked out fine in this comic, since the bots are all speaking at once, and the kid isn't paying attention.
In the strip configuration, I overlapped some balloons and deleted the edges where they intersected, following Griffy's Rule Number 12 (There should always be a decent amount of "air" surrounding the lettering in speech or thought balloons.)
This gag wasn't meant to say anything about Charles Schulz other than the fact that his name is almost always misspelled. We've all seen comments like, "I love Charles Schultz! I'm his biggest fan!"
I deliberately drew the character to look nothing like Schulz.
Most of the responses I received were from people who got the point, but I also saw this reaction online:
Charles Schulz did not need to deal with the Devil to get where he got.
That came as a surprise, although I suppose it shouldn't have.
The original art for this gag, along with a print of the color panel, will soon be on its way to the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California. The Museum already has several other Bizarro originals, by both Dan and myself.
The Museum's Collections Manager wrote to me about the gag, saying, "Our Curator is now thinking we have to do an exhibit titled There is No 'T' in Schulz! It is something the museum deals with daily!"
I wish I'd done this myself.
Here, we address another burning tech question. Most respondents agreed that the "thumbs up" emoji can effectively end a long text conversation on a cordial note.
It's heartening to see interspecies cooperation as animals adapt to the ever-expanding human population.
Some would be grateful if that's the worst that houseguests did.
This one also required a little creativity with the word balloon in the strip layout. I usually try not to show a character between others doing the speaking, but blew it on this one. Fortunately, it worked out all right, with the tail clearly indicating who's talking.
Thank you for checking in with us. Your comments are always welcome. See you again next week.
Bonus Track
Tony Bennett with Bob & Doug McKenzie SCTV Season 1, Episode 19 "The Great White North Palace" Originally aired on April 16, 1982
Tony Bennett died a few days ago at age 96. We were fortunate enough to hear him perform live a couple of times, and I wanted to remember him in this week's blog.
One of my favorite moments on SCTV was this coda to the 1982 episode "The Great White North Palace." Bennett's conversation with Bob & Doug McKenzie (after their big-budget TV special flopped), and his stripped-down version of "The Best is Yet to Come" is funny, sad, sweet, and uplifting.
I was happy to find the clip online, despite its poor quality.
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
I am a Humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
I like to scroll through websites offering quotations attributed to prominent figures, where I sometimes encounter a phrase or idea that might serve as a starting point for a gag. I often find myself exploring multiple quotes from a single person, which is how I came upon these words from Kurt Vonnegut. I did extra research on this, as I didn’t fully trust the first place I saw it because they alphabetize authors by their first names, and it appears that this is something he actually said and wrote.
Vonnegut was an honorary president of the American Humanist Association from 1992 until he died in 2007. His words express thoughts I’ve had on this subject, so perhaps I’m a (small “h”) humanist or simply a human who thinks that the basis of their philosophy makes sense. The threat (or promise) of punishments (or rewards) in an afterlife have historically been tools for control, oppression, and the acquisition of power. We still see dogmatists trying to impose their superstitions on the entire population.
My takeaway from the humanist way of thinking is, Try to be nice to people. A statement from The Humanist Society of Western New York put it more eloquently:
[T]his is the only life of which we have certain knowledge and we owe it to ourselves and others to make it the best life possible for ourselves and all with whom we share this fragile planet.
Although recent quotation-browsing may not have inspired any cartoons, it did provide a jumping-off point for this post.
My good pal and fellow ink-monkey Mark Zingarelli recently shared a page of original comic book art on his Facebook page. I clipped this panel for obvious reasons. Zing also provided info on the art. It’s from Amazing Spider-Man #59, April 1968, written by Stan Lee. The art was by John Romita (layouts), Don Heck (pencils), and Mike Esposito (inks)
Following are this week’s Bizarro gags. Please don’t compare the drawings to any other comic art you may have seen in this post.
This panel’s alternate title is Variation on an Overused Movie Cliche.
Saying the genre out loud is in itself a spoiler.
Glass distinctions are so twentieth-century.
In such a crowded field, a win would indeed be impressive.
The real one is always accompanied by a small soft drink.
Eventually, people got wise to Medusa and she had to resort to trickery.
Thanks for looking at these things we do. Your comments are always welcome. See you again next week.
Bonus Track
NRBQ: "Ridin' in My Car" From the LP All Hopped Up Red Rooster Records, 1977
I've mentioned my affection for NRBQ in the past, and this song, written by Big Al Anderson, is one of their best. It's also a perfect tune for summer, don't you think?
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
As promised in a previous post, due to a construction project at Casa Wayno, things are rather hectic here. We’ve been hanging plastic drop cloths in all the doorways and covering almost every horizontal surface. Now our home looks like the set of Netflix serial killer series. This week’s blog entry and newsletter will be less verbose than usual to keep up with cartoon deadlines.
Today, we complete the Monty Python cycle of pipe pics with a shot of John Cleese in the 1977 film, The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation as We Know It. Cleese starred as Arthur Sherlock Holmes, grandson of the famous detective.
Of course, the primary purpose of this blog is to review the latest Bizarro gags, so here they are.
BB doesn’t know that Goldie has decided his meal is the one for her.
Knowing that the whole world is watching can be a mood killer.
I admit to having no prior familiarity with the book Anne of Green Gables beyond its title, so I had to do some homework to develop a setup for the caption.
Research for this panel taught me that drinking bird toys are still around. The toy was available in China as early as the 1920s and was patented in the US in the 1940s. It’s an example of a thermodynamic device called a heat engine.
For the strip layout, I swapped the foreground and background elements.
That doesn’t seem as threatening as people make it out to be.
Based on multiple true stories. Take your pick.
That's the latest from my corner of Hollywood Gardens, PA. Thanks for dropping by and checking out the words and pictures. I’ll probably do another short post next week and hope to be back to normal after that.
Bonus Track
Jane Aire and the Belvederes: "Yankee Wheels" Stiff Records single, 1978
Since its original release, “Yankee Wheels” has been one of my favorite summertime songs. It sounds as fresh as when I first bought a copy at Pittsburgh’s legendary music store, Jim’s Records. I believe the sticker price was $2.50.
