WaynoBlog: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sauce

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 sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is oneself.

Clifton Fadiman

I hope you survived April Fools' Day with your dignity and sense of humor intact, and someone pranked you, it was good-natured rather than mean-spirited.

Today's pipe pic is either Dave Meyers or Louis Meyers of the Aces blues band. I've seen another photo of Louis with a pipe, so I'm inclined to believe this is Louis in the photo, but I can't say for sure.

The brothers were both guitarists, but Dave eventually switched to electric bass. The four-piece group often backed up well-known blues musicians such as Little Walter, Otis Rush, and Eddie Boyd.

My friend Dave Molter, a musician, journalist, and all-around good egg, sent me the photo, which also included this excerpt from an interview with Dave Meyers:

My brother Louis and I tend to be thought of as cotton-field bluesmen. We really rocked the city. When we started here in the 1940s, it was all about big bands and swing music. We hung out a lot with a guy named Lee Cooper, who played swing. He got us excited about music, told us to get into it, to learn it, and sent us to this department store—Lyon and Healy, it was called—where lots of good teachers left their contact information.

And that's how we started. We practiced scales, learned to play little by little. When the Aces were launched, we were untouchable in Chicago. We were among the very first in town to put pickups on our guitars, in 1945. And we must have been the first here to play Gibsons. I had this old L-5 until a fat lady sat on it. And I was the first guy in town to play electric bass. The first Fender Precision bass that came to town, at the 18th and Halsted store, they passed it to me. They said, "We know you know how to play this, take it and see what you can do with it." After that, the Fender guys came along with the first portable amp we ever saw in Chicago. When I started with that thing, everyone was blown away. I'd strap this damn thing on my back, we'd go, and everywhere I went, I'd make fun of the double bass players. We played against big, big swing bands with horns, and all we had was our guitars and harmonica. We'd smash them right there. The guys were completely blown away. It was something else. Everyone in town was afraid of us.

Thanks to Dave for the photo history lesson. I recommend Dave's Substack column, Handbasket to Hell.

The Secret Symbols are back on the job after a week of sick leave, so let's see if we can find them in the latest cartoons.

I've done six of these "What's Your Jam?" multi-panel gags and have probably squeezed as much as possible from the format.

It's a rare occurrence for 13-year and 17-year cicadas to emerge at the same time, but when it happens, the buzzing is mixed with wisecracks.

I'm generally not a fan of practical jokes, but I usually include a phony symbol count on April Fools' Day. I also try to hide the actual count somewhere in the art.

This cartoon is the 2,577th I've drawn since I started doing the Monday-through-Saturday gags.

My drawing of the orange submarine was based on Chinese deep-sea submersibles that were used for many diving missions around the world.

I wrote and drew this panel in January, weeks before the (current) war in Iran began, and it was not meant as a comment on future events, and I'll refrain from referring to any actual sock puppet in this blog.