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Saturday, April 19, 2025

The Bad, the Beautiful, and the Bizarro

Wayno

I sincerely think that humor will help save humanity from the swamp into which it is sinking. Today we can’t afford to be pessimistic, so let’s try to keep a sense of humor bolted on to our hearts, soul, and spirit!

Jean-Jacques Perrey
(1929-2016)

Jean-Jacques Perrey was a composer, performer, and producer specializing in electronic pop music. With his partner Gershon Kingsley, he was among the first performers to release commercial recordings featuring the Moog synthesizer.

Earlier this week, my friend Dana Countryman, who edited and published Cool & Strange Music! magazine from 1996 through 2003, sent me a 1998 photo of JJP wearing a t-shirt I designed for the magazine.

The design includes caricatures of many of the artists profiled in the magazine. The very bottom is out of frame, but the faces are mostly visible. Clockwise from top left, they are Art Ferrante, Bettie Page, Monsieur Perrey, Lou Teicher (Ferrante's musical partner), Yma Sumac, Tiny Tim, Mrs. Miller, Christian puppet Little Marcy, Dean Martin, and Dolores Erickson (the model who appeared on Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream album.

All twenty-eight issues of Cool & Strange Music! have been collected in a set of four books. They're packed with interviews, profiles, reviews, and photos, and I highly recommend them.

The good will Perrey expressed in the quote at the top of this post was evident in his music, and the sentiment remains relevant today.

Today's pipe picture appeared on the Book of Farce last December in a post by Bizarro reader John Z.

John commented:

I'm watching a Kirk Douglas/Lana Turner picture called "The Bad and The Beautiful"...there's a shot of Dick Powell in front of a bookstore window, his character looking at his own books on display.

Powell certainly looks happy with the window display, and we're pleased to credit John Z. for the screen capture.

Let's see if we managed to bolt some humor onto the latest Bizarro gags.

The term "planned obsolescence" might easily be replaced with "scheduled mortality."

We all know people who take idiomatic expressions litter-ally.

Next season's hot designs will include mustard in yellow or brown.

Sasquatch embodies the familiar phrase "too big to file."

If it's an emergency, rap on the tabletop three times.

The patient's advance directive included a Do Not Scramble order.

Thanks for reading and supporting Bizarro. We'll be back in a week with more comics and commentary.

Bonus Track

Dean Martin and Line Renaud: "Relax-Ay-Voo"

Capitol Records, 1955

One of my favorite Dean Martin numbers is this duet with the French singer, actress, and AIDS activist Line Renaud. As of this writing, Madame Renaud is still with us at age 98.

A Variety of Bizarro Verbiage

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Saturday, April 12, 2025

First Amendment Funnies

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."

The strip layout provides a glimpse of nearby businesses in Bizarrotown, USA.

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.

Thanks for following the old blog and for reading and supporting Bizarro.

Bonus Track

John Lennon: "Ya Ya"

From the LP Rock 'N' Roll
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

If you like what we do and appreciate that it's free of charge, we encourage you to explore the following links.

CK Bizarro Shop (Get your tee shirts here!)

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Official Bizarro Shop

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Saturday, April 05, 2025

Put That On Your Hat & Smoke It

Wayno

Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity.

Frank Zappa

Anti-intellectualism is a fascinating subject, an us-versus-them psychology, rooted in obsession with others having more of something. Instead of admiring smart people and aspiring to become one, it's easier to cry, "No fair!" as if knowledge were a physical commodity to be divvied up. "If you have some, that's less for me!"

The flipside of Frank's observation is the pervasiveness of willing, even proud stupidity. People in charge of certain systems don't want their followers to think; the uninformed are more easily controlled by the powerful.

Intelligence, reason, education, and science are so despised in some circles that they risk being legislated out of society. One hopes the pendulum will swing the other way, but it had better happen soon.

Mister Zappa left the physical plane more than thirty years ago. If only he could see us today.

Bizarro reader Michael P. sent us a pipe pic he snapped in the wild.

Michael writes:

I saw this planter at an antique store in Knoxville, Tennessee, but didn’t buy it.

This unusual piece is possibly as old as the 1950s and appears to have been a fairly popular item, based on the number for sale on Etsy and elsewhere.

Mother's Day is coming up next month, kids.

Thanks to Michael P. for recognizing a potential pipe pic and photographing it for us.

You can decide whether the latest Bizarro panels are stupid or smart. I try to find the sweet spot somewhere in between.

Romance comics were once a big thing, sometimes expanding into niche markets.

I usually include a bogus Secret Symbol count on April Fool's Day. This panel has five symbols, hinted at by the numeral in the crown. When I draw each comic, I assign a sequential number to the art, and this one was the 2,271st since I started working on the dailies—no fooling.

Wednesday's gag takes place in a corporate fretboardroom.

The musical gag prompted my favorite comment of the week over on BlueSky:

Superb work! The chord frames on the sheet music are realistic, and well spaced. The Gibson SG, Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster are all accurate, with correct curves on the Fender headstocks. Realistic controls on the amplifier. Few people will notice, but BRAVO!

Thanks to sombermoose for paying attention to the details. Comments like yours make the effort worthwhile.

Recontextualizing a familiar phrase or swapping in a different word can provide the seeds for a gag, as with this oracular offering.

"...and serve it in a paper cup."

At least poor word choices are easy to fix.

That's the latest from my Little Shop of Humor. Drop by next week for more cartoons and commentary.

Bonus Track

Michael Hurley: "Long Journey"

From the LP Long Journey
Rounder Records, 1984

Outsider folk musician, singer-songwriter, and sometime cartoonist Michael Hurley died this week at age 83. His debut album, First Songs, was released in 1963. Several of his subsequent LPs featured his wolf cartoon characters Jocko and Boone.

Hurley was a true American original.

A Panoply of Bizarro Prose & Products

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