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
A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
In my household, we watch spooky movies throughout October. Some are works of art, and some are goofy romps. One film we revisit every year is 1983's Something Wicked This Way Comes, based on Ray Bradbury's 1962 horror/fantasy novel.
The text quoted above didn't make it into the movie, but it feels especially relevant. The lack of empathy and the level of cruelty on exhibit lately are directly related to what Bradbury called a refusal to know. The rampant "othering" of groups of our fellow humans makes too many feel they have permission to treat people as less than human. Being part of a community is wonderful, unless it devolves into tribalism.
Perhaps Halloween is popular for the same reason people celebrate Mardi Gras: Masks and costumes can obscure the arbitrary differences people with too much (or too little) power and wealth exploit to define groups of people as "them."
Today (Saturday), we'll be attending our town's annual Halloween parade, cheering the high school band in their themed costumes, and watching kids scramble for treats thrown their way.
I hope you all have an enjoyable Halloween, see a lot of fabulous costumes, and give and receive the best treats. Mask up, have fun, and meet and greet your neighbors.
Don't refuse to know.
Bizarro field correspondent Danielle A. spotted this vintage metal leaf tobacco box in a collectibles shop in her hometown.
The illustration on the box is charming and well-executed. The marine looks as if he's emerging from a porthole in its side.
Thanks to Danielle for taking the photo and sharing it with us. I love to see pipes found in the wild.
Oh, and if you ever see a Bizarro comic displayed somewhere out in the physical world, I'd be grateful for a photo of that, too.
Halloween creeps into Bizarro this week and next, although we keep the holiday in our dark hearts all through the year. Here's the latest sextet of cartoons.
Monday's gag was inspired by the Beatles knockoff records that proliferated in the 1960s. Designed to fool well-meaning grandmas, the phony groups had names like the Buggs, the Liverpools, or the Beat-A-Manias.
Metaphorical, if not inaccurate.
I offer my apologies to Charles Schulz.
"But I'm keeping the Dr. Brown's eyeball soda."
Their business card says "England's Newest Note Takers."
We wrap up with a reading from The Book of Rebellious Offspring 6:13-22.
Thanks for taking the time to read these boxes of badinage. Come back next week for more of this sort of nonsense.
Bizarro Bonus Track
The Kirby Stone Four: "You Came From Outer Space"
From Man I Flipped When I Heard the Kirby Stone Four Cadence Records LP, 1958
The Kirby Stone Four were one of many vocal quartets of the 1950s and early 1960s. They released many LPs on Columbia Records and other, smaller labels, but their debut on Cadence remains my favorite.
The group incorporated boisterous comedy, vocal impersonations, and a jazzy sensibility that set them apart from a lot of their contemporaries.
I chose "You Came From Outer Space" as today's bonus track because it's fitting for Halloween, and as a nod to Bizarro's Secret Symbol, the Flying Saucer of Possibility.
This song closes out the Rhino Records box set Brain in a Box: The Science Fiction Collection, a five-CD compilation released in 2000. Each disc is dedicated to a genre or style: movie themes, TV themes, Pop, Lounge/Incidental, and Novelty. I served as an "A&R consultant" on the project, and the KS4 track was one of my suggestions that made the cut.
Rhino was known for extravagant packaging, and Brain was one of their most elaborate box sets.
It's designed to resemble a mad scientist's apparatus powered by a human brain, and it has lenticular images on three sides. It's a gem in my collection.
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If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore 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
I can't stop worrying. I invent worries. Even after thirty years of making a
living at this business, I feel my career is precarious. I can always
find dark clouds even though the sun is shining. But I have a plan to consolidate my worries. I'm going to try to find a shrink
who can talk all my worries from my head down to my arm, then to my
hand, then finally down to one long fingernail. Then—wham!—all I have
to do is clip the fingernail, and all my worries will be gone.
Virgil Franklin Partch II (1916-1984)
Friday, October 17th, was the 109th anniversary of the birth of cartoonist Virgil Partch, who often signed his work with the abbreviation "ViP." He's one of my all-time favorites, for his art, his humor, and his (fear-based) work ethic. Partch typically started drawing at 5:00 AM and finished up by noon, after which he'd hang out with drinking buddies at a boating club or bar. Apparently, he also had a strong play ethic.
Partch created two syndicated comics: a daily panel called Big George and a strip called Captain's Gig. However, his gag cartoons for magazines, which predated the newspaper comics, were his strongest work. The gags were wild and surreal, and were reprinted in many books.
Although the humor in his newspaper comics was more conventional than his magazine gags, much of the art in early Big George panels was fantastic. He had a confident, bold line, inked with a brush, and was quite effective and tasteful in his use of Zip-A-Tone shading film.
Mid-1960s "Big George" art by ViP
Happy birthday, Vip, from an earthbound fan.
Today's canine pipe pic comes from cartoon colleague Jonathan Lemon, creator of the comic strip Rabbits Against Magic.
Mr. Lemon sent this caption:
Mascot dog from World War One, complete with his own jacket and rank button, feldmutze with cockade and his very own Iron Cross Second Class
It's a shame that someone went to the trouble of dressing their dog in a tiny uniform and training it to hold a pipe almost a hundred years before Instagram.
Big thanks to Jonathan Lemon for forwarding the image to me.
I've been in the illustration and cartooning game for more than thirty years, and will soon be starting my ninth year as Bizarro's daily cartoonist. I may not worry as obsessively as Vip did, but his fears are undoubtedly at least part of what keeps me going.
We kicked off with a wordless gag that adds a culinary touch to the legend of Saint George and the dragon.
To quote underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, 'Twas ever thus.
He was hoping for the pizza delivery driver.
My favorite part of drawing this was the products on the shelves. Here's a closer look:
Now you know.
We started the week with a wordless gag, and ended with a word that isn't really a word. It's a gag that sprang from a typo.
Thanks for reading my ramblings and looking at my drawings. I'll be back next Saturday with more cartoons and commentary.
Bonus Track
Stan Freberg: "St. George and the Dragonet"
Capitol Records single, 1953
Stan Freberg, one of the great humorists of the last century, offers his take on the Saint George legend, mashed up with Dragnet.
Jack Webb's Dragnet, a massive hit on TV and radio, inspired many parodies, including this one from Jay Ward studios:
Can't Get Enough of That Bizarro Stuff?
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore 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
The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death. These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.
Mario Monicelli (1915-2010)
Greetings from brisk and breezy Hollywood Gardens, PA. Fall has arrived, and with it an early autumn cold—or perhaps allergies caused by pollen, since that seems to have been the year's most successful crop.
I've been enduring various unpleasant symptoms for the past two weeks, and missed two live music events I was looking forward to. I decided to stay at home to avoid spreading the ick to friends and strangers, and I'm almost back to normal as I write this post.
In the future, I may refer to filmmaker Mario Monicelli's words when someone finds one of our cartoons to be too dark. Who knew that the propensity for morbid humor has a genetic component?
Today's multi-pipe pic comes from Bizarro international field correspondent Pablo D.
Pablo sent these notes:
Walking home after lunch today with a friend, we stopped to look at another Tabac with a pipe display in the window. He said there used to be a local shop whose owner made pipes. The sad ending is that he wanted a custom made meerschaum pipe, but waited too long. When he was ready, the shop owner had retired and the shop was closed.
Oh well. But as an American living in France now, I appreciate the support from the government in general to the traditional trades, all the culinary trades, workshops like printing, bookbinding, etc.
Tabac is the name of a French convenience store where you can grab stamps, lottery tickets, mobile phone chargers, and maybe an espresso. It sounds more elegant than the 7-Eleven down the street, doesn't it?
Merci to Pablo for the photo and for the story. It sounds like you had a lovely afternoon with your friend, and I wish I could've been there.
Here's the latest batch of Bizarro cartoons. Apologies in advance for any black humor that may have crept in.
I was delighted to learn that the German word for "menu" includes an umlaut.
Also, extraterrestrials visiting Germany arrive in a flying beer mug.
Before returning to the ship, their parting words were, "Stay warm and prosper."
Anchovius the Salty is Rome's forgotten monarch.
To be fair, they're drawn almost the same from the neck down.
Many airline passengers are "Papa Bears" whose carry-on bags are too large to stow overhead or under the seats. The airline then checks their luggage at the gate for free, while customers who paid in advance feel like chumps.
Carry-ons and "personal items" continue to expand, causing passengers to juggle their oversized bags, which slows down boarding and deplaning.
When we launch Bizarro Airlines, I'll propose that we check bags for free but charge fifty bucks for carry-on items larger than a purse or messenger bag.
Father Bibendum is a harsh confessor.
Although he looks less intimidating than he did in the early 1900s.
With that disturbing image, we conclude this week's cartoon recap.
Comments From Bots
AI has started making blog comments containing advertising links. Fortunately, Google Blogger marks them as potential spam, and they're easily deleted, but it's still a pain. Yet another example of what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification."
Bonus Track
Werner Hass: "Witch Doctor"
Telefunken Records single, 1958
Since we kicked off the week with an Oktoberfest gag, here's a German record that's also Halloween-appropriate. Many years ago, I acquired a small stack of German-language records of American songs, and most of them are amusingly absurd. (This was scanned and digitized from my personal collection.)
A Basketful of Bizarro Baubles
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore 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
Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.
Jane Goodall (1934-2025)
Jane Goodall, the renowned anthropologist, primatologist, and conservationist, passed away this week at the age of 91. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with
chimpanzees "represents one of the Western world’s great scientific
achievements."
My friend, Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, who knew Dr. Goodall, posted this thoughtful and heartfelt tribute on her passing:
Jane was a saint, a true gift to the world, and the most extraordinary force for good I have ever known. She devoted her life to protecting our planet and all its creatures. Heartbroken as I am, I know the best way to honor her is for us all to carry her mission forward.
Patrick's words about Dr. Goodall's lifelong work are a comforting reminder that there are still forces for good in the world. We need them, and need to be among them, more than ever.
Today's dapper (though slightly sweaty) pipe model is actor Jack Palance.
Richard G. of Quebec sent me several worthy photos of Palance, and this one was my favorite.
Richard wrote:
Last week, as my honey and I were watching the 1960s horror portmanteau ‘Torture Garden’, adapting a quartet of Robert Bloch short stories, I kept noticing, during the connecting sequences, Jack Palance puffing on a pipe in the background. When his story (‘The Man Who Collected Poe’) came around, he was more prominently featured, to the point that I simply can’t decide what the best pipe pic might be. I leave that difficult choice to you!
Richard is a comics historian with great respect for comics creators, and he publishes an excellent blog called Who's Out There, which I highly recommend.
Thanks for the great photo(s), Richard, and for your impeccable cartoon scholarship.
Here are my most recent cartoons, beginning appropriately enough with a chimpanzee.
Our simian cousins would be better stewards of the planet and its resources than many humans.
"But I don't want to lose my slice."
Part of a cartoonist's job is second-guessing oneself. When I look at this panel now, I think the sign on the kiosk could have said, "You're still here."
Thursday's panel was a parable in cartoon form.
Who actually named this thing?
The calliope playing Chopin's "Funeral March" was a nice touch.
That's the latest from Bizarro Studios North. Visit us next week for another six-pack of comics and commentary. Thanks for dropping by.
Kudos (?) From a Bot
This gag from a couple of weeks ago generated a baffling, possibly complimentary comment on Instagram.
I wonder how much ozone was destroyed by the platform generating this muck.
Bonus Track
Dave Bartholomew: "The Monkey"
Imperial Records single, 1957
Dave Bartholomew was a great musician, producer, composer, performer, bandleader, and producer. He was a key figure in New Orleans music and had a long and successful partnership with Fats Domino. Fats not only recorded many of Bartholomew's songs, but he was often backed by Bartholomew's band on records and in live performances.
A Boatload of Bizarro Booty & Blather
If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free, we encourage you to explore the following links.
