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
Surrealism had a profound effect on me because it made me realize that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. To me, surrealism is reality.
John Lennon
I recently learned that John Lennon created a handmade newspaper called The Daily Howl as a teenager. The newspaper included stories, poems, and cartoon drawings. I knew that Lennon went on to art school, but I wasn't aware of his early cartoon work.
Many cartoonists double as musicians, and vice versa, so it wasn't a surprise to learn about The Daily Howl, but it made me feel a deeper connection to Lennon. I was nearly kicked out of my high school graduation ceremony for publishing an underground paper during my senior year.
Early in the school year, some friends and I decided to create an underground newspaper lampooning our school, teachers, students, and ourselves. It was juvenile and pretty tame. A couple of teachers provided production materials and allowed us to use the school's ditto machine to print a few copies of our paper. Everyone wrote material, and I did all the drawing and hand-lettered the columns.
Our civics teacher, a diminutive, tightly wound authoritarian, took offense at a bogus advertisement for the pizzeria he owned, probably because we referred to it as "Little Tony's Pizza Shop." He raised a stink about us disrupting the education process because students were passing the papers around during class.
We were hauled before the principal, and our parents were called in. The teachers who helped us denied their roles and claimed that we stole materials and used the printing machine without permission, which taught us a valuable lesson about trust.
We were given three days' suspension and forced to promise not to do it again. My parents destroyed the only copy of the paper I had, although later, another student gave me a Xeroxed copy, which would last longer than the original version but without that delightful chemical smell.
As graduation day drew near, a student whose brother worked at a print shop offered to publish a year-end issue if we were up for it. Naturally, we said yes and were careful to do everything outside of school property.
The finished product was perfect: nicely printed in sharp black ink on multiple neon-colored pages and stapled in the corner. Classes for seniors ended a few days before everyone else's so we could attend graduation rehearsal. We chose an off-campus location where our classmates could drive by and get a copy of the year-end issue.
The rehearsal went smoothly, but at the very end, as the graduating class let out a mass cheer, our fellow students threw our beautiful newspapers into the air, and they blew all over the football field.
That evening, we were called to an "emergency" school board meeting, along with our parents. The school staged a "trial" for us. My parents assured them that no matter what the board decided, I'd also be severely punished at home—another lesson learned.
The parents of one of my buddies brought an attorney, who explained that students don't give up their First Amendment rights when they walk onto school property. The board members decided that the kid with legal representation was the ringleader (they did move here from New York after all!), and he alone would be barred from participating in commencement, which would take place the following week.
My friend's parents took the school board to court, and the judge agreed that we'd done nothing illegal and that we all should be allowed to participate in commencement. When my friend's name was called to receive his diploma, the students cheered wildly. The next day, a story about him with a photo ran in the newspaper. We all should have been featured in the article, and I fumed about him getting the notoriety. It still rankles me a little.
In subsequent years, the school instituted a rule prohibiting unauthorized student newspapers and announced it at the beginning of every term, so it seems we left a legacy.
Somewhere in my storage unit, I have one copy of each issue of our paper, which I haven't seen in years.
More than a decade after it happened, I turned the episode into an eight-page comic story, which was factual except for changing everyone's names. It ran in Rip-Off Comix, and I was thrilled to have my work published by one of the pioneering underground comix companies.
I recently found a review of the work on ComixJoint:
Wayno continues his every-other-issue appearance pattern with "Kangaroo High!" This is a different type of comic for Wayno, though, as he reminisces on the underground high-school newspaper he put together with a couple buddies back in the '70s. It's funny stuff, and I'm betting that every word in this story is true. "Kangaroo High!" is still relevant today, showing how society's powerful factions react with abject fear and damnation of anything different...but that's changing a little bit now, though, isn't it?
I'm grateful not to be a high school student in 2025. Who knows what kind of punishment we'd have received?
Today's pipe pic is a scene from a December 1966 episode of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's BBC TV series, Not Only... But Also.
John Lennon appears as a doorman, offering a light to Peter Cook in a mock-documentary segment titled "The Pipesucker Report."
I hope none of these Bizarro panels get me in trouble.
My spouse enjoys true crime podcasts and once put a scare into me. She often listens on an iPad while moving about the house. I was at my drawing table, working as usual, and I heard a voice similar to my partner's say, "Call 9-1-1."
I owe an apology to my neighbors. The day this panel ran, we had an April snow shower.
Their typing skills are rather impressive.
I have no idea where this gag came from. I must have seen the word "grandiloquence" somewhere and gone off on a weird detour.
The lengthy dialogue and caption required extra creativity to fit into the strip layout.
The woodsman needn't worry about being audited. In 2025, we'll be lucky if our tax returns go through the system at all.
One must be specific when speaking with attorneys and genies.
Bonus Track
John Lennon: "Ya Ya"
From the LP Rock 'N' Roll
Apple Records, 1975
Apple Records, 1975
Lennon did a decent cover of the Lee Dorsey classic on his 1975 oldies album.
A Trove of Bizarro Trinkets and Trivia
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I too engaged in some shenanigans in High School. Black armbands to protest the invasion of Cambodia, running around in the tunnels under the school, banging on the ceiling(floor of the classroom), and a mass wearing of sandals to school to protest guys not being allowed to wear them when the girls could. Probably get sent to El Salvador today.
ReplyDeleteKurt, I wasn't going to say it, but yes, I thought that today, we'd have been deported.
DeleteBack in the mid-1970s, my husband was a sophomore at a local private high school and published an underground newspaper. He got caught and was politely informed, at the end of the school year, that he would not be welcomed back the following year.
ReplyDeleteThe “High School Equivalency Test” had just come out, so he took that, passed it, got his diploma, and went to the local junior college. At the time he was the youngest student, at age 15, that they had ever admitted.
He did his general education requirements to be eligible to transfer to a university later (students in this city do that as it is much cheaper to attend the junior college than university) and also got his welding certificate and took some classes like graphic arts and theater arts.
Wow, thanks for sharing that. I'm so glad to hear that he ended up in a better situation despite the overreaction from his school. I feel a kinship with him!
DeleteI don’t see what the big deal is. So what if students take up a clever project? Seems like they should appreciate your industriousness. How obnoxious that anyone (including your parents, Wayno) would consider this a reason for “severe punishment”. As a neighbor of mine once said, “ there are real problems in the world, and this isn’t one of them”.
DeleteMy favorite high school prank: We had a dress code that girls were not allowed to show their navel. Our valedictorian had had some surgery that, as a side effect, removed her navel. So, for the last day of school, we convinced her to wear a short top that, on anyone else, would have shown their navel. She did not get in trouble.
ReplyDeleteJon, another great high school story! Gotta love the loopholes!
DeleteI love your underground school newspaper story! I'm surprised I'd not heard it before. I'm proud to be partnered with such a rabble-rouser!
ReplyDeleteThanks, amigo!
DeleteI'll have to scan the comic I did. The art wasn't very good, but I think I'd still be happy with the writing.
I went to a private girls school run by nuns when streaking was a thing.Of course we were the perfect target. After a few runs passed the front of the school the nuns moved classes to the back. Unfortunately, it was not the solution. Because of the topography, the outcome was the steakers ran past windows that allowed the view from chest down. No identifying faces. So close..
ReplyDeleteThat's hilarious!
DeleteI think I'm a little older than you. It was 1967 and a large crowd of students spent the night on the lawn in front of the administrative buildings of Florida State University (in Tallahassee, aka FSU which got changed to HalfAss U) protesting the censorship of a student literary magazine because ONE short story contained certain four-letter words (the "f" and "s" bombs). We really wanted to be California with its heady university free speech movement, but, alas, it was not to happen!
ReplyDeleteAnother thought: it IS all about time and place. Had you been in Cambridge, MA, you might have been in on the birth of what became The National Lampoon. I was first introduced to some of my favorite cartoonists (and characters) via that magazine: Gilbert Shelton with Wonder Wart Hog and Fat Freddy's Cat, the marvelously macabre Gahan Wilson, M K Brown...
Thanks for sharing your experience! National Lampoon was a big influence on me back then too. It gave me one of those "I'm NOT supposed to be seeing this" thrills that come along a few times in life.
DeleteI briefly worked as a writer in the UPMC PR department in the 1990s. This was the period when the medical center undertook the first successful baboon-to-human liver transplant. As you know, writers may also be iconoclasts. I started an underground newspaper called "The Simian: Written by Baboons for Baboons." It was not mean-spirited, just downright goofy. After I published the first issue among my fellow writers -- an issue in which the main character was the widow of the deceased baboon liver donor -- some came to me with contributions. Soon we had not only news, but sports, advice columns, cooking and a personals section. I still have a complete set of issues. I left UPMC after only 9 months, and one of my co-culprits told me that our supervisor found a copy of one of the issues after I quit, entered her office, threw the paper on her desk and said, "THIS is what you FRIEND was doing when he was supposed to be working!" That's not quite true: I did all my work before I wrote "The Simian."
ReplyDeletePeople sure do get riled up over independent thought and satire, even the goofy variety.
DeleteI had discovered the National Lampoon as a Junior in high school. I also thought I'd write some type of parody school newspaper, but I only got as far as a few scribbled paragraphs and a front cover image (a hamburger with a fork in it with blood trickling down the side. I don't remember why I came up with that image, I probably had a nasty hamburger in the school cafeteria that day).
ReplyDeleteI'm finding so many subversives among our readership, and I love it.
DeleteThose early Lampoons were thrillingly transgressive. I knew I had to hide them from my parents!
YOL9 is absolutely priceless Wayno!
ReplyDeleteThanks! I had hoped people would get it, maybe after a slight pause.
Delete