Welcome to the Working Week

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

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No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.

Sonny Rollins

Our colleague Mark Parisi, cartoonist of the award-winning panel Off the Mark, recently started a lively social media discussion after hearing an interview with a writer who said, "Don't try to find ideas. Wait for ideas to find you." Naturally, people who meet regular deadlines disagreed with this advice, poetic as it might sound.

I didn't hear the interview myself, and I wonder if they provided context about an idea being a starting point that may or may not lead to creative work, but taken on its own it sounds like a plan for accomplishing nothing.

The words of master musician Sonny Rollins make more sense. Creating anything of value requires effort and persistence. They're not called works of art for nothing. The idea of lying around waiting for the heavens to drop something into one's lap is laughable.

Each part of Rollins's sentence is important.

No matter how you feel

When you work on deadlines, other people depend on you. If your output stops, they can't do their jobs. Deadlines don't care if you're depressed or hung over or have the flu. You have to keep feeding the frogs. It's important not to just meet deadlines, but to get ahead of them, so you can have sick days or take a vacation.

Get up

A regular routine trains your body and brain that it's time to be productive, whether you're facing a deadline, or are working on a novel or other project with no due date. It might be even more important for an open-ended situation.

Dress up

We're not talking about a uniform or a suit and tie, but just as your pajamas gently tell your body to wind down and prepare to sleep, your daywear signals that it's time to be productive. Again, it's about being active instead of passive.  

 

Show up

Choose a location (or locations) where you can explore ideas and let your mind do its thing. Showing up also means getting to work, whether it's a tiny scribble, a word or phrase you've overheard or seen, or another undeveloped bit. The point is to start with something and move on from there. Creative works of any kind (visual art, recipes, poetry, prose, etc.) rarely emerge from the mind fully formed

Unlike a blank canvas, a small fragment can be edited, expanded, refined, erased, polished, twisted, and beaten into shape.

Successful farmers don't wait to see what grows in their fields. They select and plant crops with intention and nurture them to produce a useful harvest.

I'm confident in the quote's authenticity, as it comes from the recently published Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, edited by Sam V.H. Reesentary, who had access to the musician's archives. Since the notebooks were physical journals, the words were presumably handwritten by Mr. Rollins.

We're grateful for Sonny Rollins, who is still with us at age 93, for his music and wisdom.

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We found today's perplexing pipe pic on eBay:

The listing was titled "German Toy Head with Pipe." I'm fascinated by that continuous line of hair and beard encircling this character's cranium.

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Now, let's get up, dress up, and check in on the latest Bizarro cartoons.

We kicked off the week with a reconfiguration of a panel I sketched last October:

I decided at the time that the snowblower nightmare wasn't a great gag in that form, so I set it aside. When I looked at it again, I realized that the real joke was the snowperson removing their eyes to go to sleep, and redrew it for this week's batch.

That sketch also inspired a recent James Bond snowman gag, since I was thinking about things that might scare a snow-being.

I'm still learning not to fret if a gag doesn't work the first time, because it may eventually turn into a usable joke, or more than one.

Unfortunately, I might have jinxed us weather-wise by running the sleeping snowman in March. We'd been having lovely spring weather until Monday when temperatures dropped and we had snowfall.

The real challenge is finding those tiny keyboards.

The drawing and dialog were reverse-engineered from the caption.

Drawing this triggered a memory from my childhood. Charlie, a kid from our neighborhood adopted a phrase that he drove into the ground over an entire summer. His go-to insult was "You're a cumbersome mass of plasmatic gel." 

Every time he said it, which was maddeningly often, he'd smugly walk away as if he'd just destroyed an opponent with his bon mot.

Charlie, if you're still around I nominate you for a Golden Glob.

We all recognize someone we know here. Don't be that person.

As with the Golden Glob panel, this one resulted from my eye for words, particularly pairs of nearly identical words. That's probably a product of my daily routine of working the crossword, Wordle, and Spelling Bee in The New York Times, plus a few other verbal puzzles and games.

Note: This cartoon is not a critique of the actual musicians. They're passionate about their belief in justice and human rights, and put their money where their collective mouth is. 

This one even made me a little queasy. 

That's it for another round of cartoons from yours truly. Thanks for showing up.

See you next week with more words, pictures, music and whatnot.

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Bonus Track #1

Sonny Rollins: "Alfie's Theme"

Impulse! Records, 1966

The musician's original score for the 1966 film. The album has six tracks running just over thirty minutes and is a favorite here at Bizarro Studios North.

Bonus Track #2

Elvis Costello: "Welcome to the Working Week"

From My Aim is True, Stiff Records 1977

The Sonny Rollins quote reminded me of this song from Costello's first album.

Welcome to the working week

I know it don't thrill you, I hope it don't kill you

Welcome to the working week

You gotta do it till you're through it so you better get to it

When I bought this from Jim's Records in 1977, I played it nonstop for several days, and have done so regularly ever since. Every note of it is etched in my memory.

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