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 got to do all this crazy shit—no regrets. That's the life, man. I hope to keep doing stuff until I croak.”
Ralph Carney (1956-2017)
Tuesday, January 23 was the anniversary of Ralph Carney's birth. Ralph was a singular musician, equally passionate about justice in the world and unabashed silliness. Above all, he was a treasured friend. Rather than focus on his passing, I like to observe his birthday, and remember his joy in "doing stuff."
It's a few days late, but I wish each of you a Happy Ralph Day. Get out there and do some crazy shit.
Today's pipe pic comes to us courtesy of Bizarro reader Geoff G of Eugene, Oregon.
Geoff will soon make his debut as a member of the chorus in a production of Verdi's La Traviata. The costume designer asked him to grow out his beard and sent him this stock photo of a hipsterish gentleman as a styling suggestion. I presume the ear stud and pipe are optional accessories.
Thanks to Geoff for the image. Let's wish him well in his first operatic appearance.
Coincidentally, your cartoonist decided to take a month off from shaving for no particular reason. My spouse and I are doing Dry(ish) January, and I joked that I'd also do Januhairy.
I learned that I'm not the first to think of that portmanteau. In contrast to my frivolous experiment, Januhairy is a social media-based movement that started around six years ago. It's meant to encourage women to challenge conventional beauty standards, or more accurately, double standards.
I look forward to ending my hirsute hiatus and I tip my hat to the participants in the original Januhairy movement.
Following up on the art supply panic mentioned in last week's post, I've since found an excellent brush marker that I'll be using in the future. I was also able to order a supply of the one I've been using, from a vendor who still had some in stock. This batch should last me through the end of the year.
My plan is to continue to produce Bizarro gags, with whatever tools I have available. Let's review the latest examples, shall we?
Last June I did an entire week of gags using puns and wordplay in honor of Dan Piraro’s ongoing "Sunday Punnies" comics. I recently found myself with another bunch of panels with punny captions and scheduled them for this week.
Please bear with me if this type of gag isn't your cup of tea.
Apologies to anyone who's disturbed by the image of an infant with a mustache. Januhairy, indeed.
For the strip, a vertical orientation worked best.
Wednesday's musical comic was seasonally appropriate. It's interesting to see how a few pieces of clothing can create recognizable versions of famous individuals.
Research for this drawing taught me that these containers are properly called gable top cartons. And of course, it would make sense that they speak through their spouts.
The dancing carton's pose was modeled on the familiar Chuck Jones character, Michigan J. Frog, although gable top cartons apparently are not as limber as frogs.
I fretted over using the correct letters in the dialog. I must have checked it CCC times.
It's nothing personal, just church business.
Thanks for joining us on a walk down Comical Memory Lane. We'll have another selection of words and pictures for you next Saturday, assuming I survive the straight razor shave I have scheduled for February 1.
Bonus Track
Tom Waits: "Telephone Call from Istanbul"
From the 1988 film Big Time
Waits's band at the time featured Ralph Carney, who takes a killer solo on this tune.
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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 PANIC.
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew
Bob Dylan (Tangled Up in Blue)
Your cartoonist's anxiety was slightly elevated recently when I tried to reorder a supply of my favorite Japanese brush pen and learned that it had been discontinued. They're easy to work with, with a point that's flexible enough for varying line widths, the ink is nice and dark, and they're inexpensive, which is a plus because I use a lot of them. After about a week, the point becomes smooshed and I open up a fresh one. I do keep the older ones for filling in solid black areas.
Fortunately, the manufacturer has another product that seems to use the same ink and has an identical point, with a different barrel. I inked a couple of gags with the new one, and there were no accidents or injuries. The cost is similar to the old standby, so all is well once again.
The quotes from Adams and Dylan come to mind as I recall this brief non-crisis. Every one of them words rang true, indeed.
Today's pipe pic is another self-portrait by a cartoonist.
Justin Green (1945-2022) introduces the 1972 minicomic "Jud" Green's Underground Cartooning Course.
I was aware of this mini, but don't own a copy. The entire book was recently posted on the Desert Island Comics Instagram page, which is where I snagged this image.
Green was an underground comix pioneer. His groundbreaking Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary virtually created the genre of autobiographical comix, and influenced countless cartoonists, including Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Bill Griffith.
Green and his wife Carol Tyler, a masterful cartoonist in her own right, are the subjects of the recent documentary, Married to Comics. It's a powerfully honest film, which I highly recommend.
Now that I've calmed down, let's see the most recent Bizarro gags, which were inked with a trusty Kuretake PK-10S brush pen.
While we realize that lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs en masse, the myth is a useful metaphor for human behavior, including that of a significant minority of the American voting public.
As a person of Italian heritage, I endorse this treatment.
The arboreal equivalent of wearing short pants all year round.
If household pests were that neat in reality, people might not be so quick to hire exterminators.
I felt slightly guilty about cropping out the customer's head, but I was happy with the way I drew the pest control guy's shoes.
My inner coffee snob turns up its nose at espresso in paper cups, but I'll drink one in a cafe without protest. However, I draw the line at taking it to go.
Pulling strings is itself a job requirement.
And that closes out another week of two-dimensional jocularity. Thanks for checking it out.
See you next Saturday with more of this stuff. Remember not to panic, and to keep on keepin' on.
Bonus Track
Bob Dylan: "On the Road Again"
From Bringing It All Back Home
Columbia Records LP, 1965
Not the Willie Nelson song, "On the Road Again" contains some of Dylan's most hilariously surreal lyrics.
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If you like what we do, and appreciate that it comes to you free of charge, we encourage you to explore any or all of the following links.
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
Let's all pitch in and do our thing, make a better world to live in.
Earl King (1934-2003)
I'm trying to maintain a positive attitude in this portentous year. It's all too easy to become discouraged and lose hope for the human race. Earl King's song "Let's Make a Better World" was first recorded by Dr. John in 1974, and I've always loved it. For the past few years, my musical group has closed out every performance and rehearsal with our version of the song. Some may find the lyrics to be corny, but King's message about doing what we can to help and support others in our own neighborhood makes a lot of sense, and is an eloquent expansion of the familiar phrase "Think globally, act locally."
Our pipe pic is a 1967 self-portrait by illustrator/cartoonist Bob Clarke (1926-2013).
Clarke had a long career doing advertising illustration and design work. His most widely seen creation was probably the label for Cutty Sark whisky.
More importantly (to me, anyway), Clarke was a contributor to MAD from 1956 to 2010. I found the self-portrait on my colleague Mike Lynch's excellent blog about cartoon art and the cartooning business. Thanks, Mike!
Speaking of the cartoon biz, here are the Bizarro gags for the second week of this shiny new year.
This ran the morning after the 2024 Golden Globe Awards, but it was a coincidence rather than planning on my part.
Tuesday's gag was inspired by the peculiar language of real estate.
If this fashion mashup ever comes to be, remember where you saw it first.
The strip layout stumped me until I realized I could get away with cropping the customer at her shoulders.
I said I was trying to maintain a positive outlook, not that I was succeeding at it.
Your cartoonist admits to feeling queasy when drawing Friday's gag, and even worse when coloring it, but I powered through the nausea because I care.
I don't have the data at hand, but I believe I've poked fun at Batman more than any other comic book superhero. I'd guess that Spider-Man would come in a distant second.
And just like that, another week of cartoonery has passed.
Take care of yourselves, and choose your footwear responsibly. See you next Saturday with gags involving lemmings, trees, pasta sauce, mice, cats, and coffee.
Thank you, as always, for your readership and support.
Bonus Track
The Red Beans & Rice Combo: "Let's Make a Better World"
From the album Breaking Up the House.
Bonedog Records, 2023
Please excuse the additional hyping of our new CD. We're trying to recover the cost of licensing the songs so they can be distributed legally. If you'd like to help with that effort, you can buy the disc here.
It's also available on all of the usual streaming platforms and is downloadable from Apple Music, Amazon, and other retailers of digital music.
More Bizarro Stuff
If you like what we do, and appreciate that it comes to you free of charge, we encourage you to explore any or all of the following links.
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
Civilization cannot last or advance without culture.
Ahmad Jamal (1930-2023)
Happy New Year to you all. Deadlines being what they are, it's now early March on my drawing board, but I did take a little time away from the studio for low-key holiday festivities.
This blog post will be briefer than usual. The platform I've been using for my weekly newsletter is supposed to shut down in late February, but it's already falling apart, so I'm working on launching it on a new, more stable site. There's a bit of a learning curve, but I think it'll be a good move.
Last week I shared a musical selection by the distinguished jazz musician Ahmad Jamal, and today we kick off with a quote from him. We at Bizarro Studios like to think that we contribute to our society's culture, if only in a small way.
In keeping with the theme of "cultcha," our first pipe pic model of the New Year is the late opera star Luciano Pavarotti.
The great tenor inspired a panel in my pre-Bizarro comic, WaynoVision.
Before anyone writes to correct my Italian, I'm aware that the lyric to the famous Neapolitan song is "O sole mio." I took liberties with the spelling in the hope that English-speaking readers would hear the word in their head as having two syllables.
It may have been a mistake, but I was my own editor on that comic. Today, I have wonderful real editors, who I can rely on to help me out with spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
Now that we've excavated an old cartoon, let's check out more recent work.
He also has difficulty in choosing between hemming and hawing.
Everybody deserves equine justice under the law.
These apex predators have many skills, but disguise isn't one of them.
A few sharp-eyed readers informed me that these characters are wearing the uniform of a Petty Officer Third Class. My photo research was clearly a little sloppy here, but to be fair, "Petty Officer Third Class Crunch" would have crowded the caption box.
Friday's gag depicts a scene from the catering tent on a Sergio Leone film shoot.
Sometimes one can blend in by standing out.
That wraps up our first batch of gags for 2024. Please drop by again next week.
Thank you, as always, for your readership and support.
Bonus Track
Mose Allison, "You Are My Sunshine"
From the album I've Been Doin' Some Thinkin'
Atlantic Records, 1968
The Italian phrase "o sole mio" translates roughly as "oh, my sun," which reminded me of Mose Allison's unique version of "You Are My Sunshine."
It's not a bad song to start the year with.
Alternate Bizarro Sources
If you like what we do, and appreciate that it comes to you free of charge, we encourage you to explore any or all of the following links.
