The Sincerest Form of Mockery

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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Welcome to this year's first post-eclipse blog entry.

Here in Hollywood Gardens, PA, we witnessed a nearly total eclipse (with 97 percent coverage). We used proper eye protection and nobody was raptured, so it was a good day.

I realize that it wasn't the same as seeing totality, but if I had consistently received 97 percent on tests during my academic years, I'd have been ecstatic.

Last week, In recognition of the fifteenth anniversary of my first published Bizarro gag, Dan Piraro and I recorded a video chat where we talked about our first meeting, and how our partnership has evolved over the years. Our memories were fairly consistent, and we didn't say anything embarrassing, but we could have been clearer on who does what. We may cover that in our next video.

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Faithful Jazz Pickle Danielle A. hipped me to this somber pipe pic, originally published in the Toronto Daily Star.

The model is future actor Alan Alda at age two. According to Alda's 2005 memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed:

A photographer from the Toronto Daily Star came backstage, and my father got the idea that if he posed me in a way that made me look as if I were smoking a pipe, the paper would be sure to print the picture and the burlesque company would get some unusual publicity. They dressed me up in my woolen suit and posed me gravely holding a pipe with tobacco in it. They seem to have invented a new name for me, too. I was born Alphonso D'Abruzzo, but that day I was Alphonse Robert Alda, "Ali" for short.

Big thanks to Danielle for this tidbit of showbiz history tidbit.

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Here's the totality of this week's Bizarro dailies, which can be viewed without any protective gear.

Personally, I'd like to see their imitations of each other.

Tuesday's panel intentionally omitted the Dynamite of Boom Secret Symbol. That guy doesn't need any additional hazards.

I'll go out on a limb and claim that the expression "pipe down" originated in or near Scotland.

Everything at their place is big and fancy. Imagine the chamber pot.

According to the National Archives, the commonly accepted but probably untrue story is that Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence was extra large so that "someone can read my name without spectacles."

This one's for my good buddy Tom, who's been exercising his brain by learning Welsh on the DuoLingo app. I love the gag, but drawing the expanded Scrabble board was an ordeal. It's almost the equivalent of four Scrabble boards grafted together. An actual board is 15 by 15 squares, and mine is 29 by 29, with the center row and column being areas of overlap. I just did the math and see that I drew 841 squares.

Although the board is insanely detailed, this panel is still rather sparse and contains no Secret Symbols. I thought they'd distract from the gag.

The black & white panel has a more dramatic look.

The strip layout shows less of the board, but I was able to make the tile racks ridiculously wide.

My first sketch took a different approach, but I scrapped it for the Scrabble version, which had a funnier drawing and a punchier caption.

Image: Daily Post Wales

I also discovered that a Welsh language version of the game exists. Its board is a standard 15 by 15 grid, and some tiles have double letters or two-letter combinations.

We finished the week with a bit of silly medical wordplay.

Thanks for reading the comics and blog. Come by again next Saturday for more of this kind of stuff.

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Bonus Track

Clarence "Frogman" Henry
"Ain't Got No Home"

Originally released in 1959

by Argo Records

A giant of New Orleans music, Clarence "Frogman" Henry died this week at age 87. His first record gave him the nickname he carried for the rest of his life. 

Frogman was a terrific entertainer. We saw him perform outside of New Orleans in Metairie, Louisiana sometime in the 1990s, and he was a hurricane of joy and fun.

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A Boatload of Bizarro

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