Saturday, June 13, 2026

Lowe Frequencies

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 


Howdy, Bizarro Buckaroos. I'm back at Cartoon Corral after a week away from the drawing board and computer, so we're keeping things brief today. I'm fixin' to catch up on office biz and make more comics.

This week's pipe-smoking personality is the late King Hussein of Jordan, in a video screen grab from Albuquerque field correspondent Gerry J.

Gerry wrote: 
The King of Jordan was an avid ham radio operator like me. Unlike me, he was also an avid pipe smoker! Here is a screenshot from a documentary that shows him chatting on the radio with a ham in the UK.
Oddly, just before I received Gerry's email, we watched a documentary series called Wasp Woman: Murder of a B-Movie Queen, about actress Susan Cabot. It was fascinating and sad. Cabot had an ongoing romantic relationship with King Hussein (who had nothing to do with her death!).

Thanks to Gerry for the cool photo.

If you'd like to watch the short film about King Hussein the Ham, it's on YouTube (of course).

Here are the comics published while I was slacking off. The cartoon show must go on!

As my mind wandered a few months back, I speculated about what might happen if a mirror were placed face down on a scanner, and imagined this scenario. Hey, it might even prevent crashes.

I wish I had drawn the mime with a teardrop painted on his cheek.

It's "command-Z" if you're partaking of the Forbidden Operating System.

For this caption, I offer my sincere apologies.

Your cartoonist loves gags involving music and using inanimate objects as characters, so this one made me a happy ink monkey.

The food-gathering strategy of this species is the least efficient in the insect world.

Thanks for checking in. We'll have more of this stuff to share next Saturday.

If you crave more in-depth geekery and behind-the-scenes trivia, please consider subscribing to my free Substack newsletter.

Bonus Track

Nick Lowe: "Shake That Rat"
from Bowi
Stiff Records 7-inch EP (1977)


"Shake That Rat" is a surf-style instrumental with the bass guitar taking the lead. It was originally released on Bowi, Nick's smart-alec answer to David Bowie's Low album.

Nearly fifty years later, Lowe is still recording and performing, and his songwriting is better than ever. These days, he performs solo, or backed by Los Straitjackets, and he's worth seeing in any context.


9 comments:

  1. Steve Nicholson7:02 PM

    I saw Nick Lowe solo in our little gold rush town of Grass Valley, California in April. He was unsurprisingly fabulous. He was sick on the originally-scheduled date so his opening act, The Cactus Blossoms, played instead. When he played the make-up date the next week our favorite local band, Golden Shoulders, got to open for him. Their songwriter, Adam Kline, is a huge Nick Lowe fan. In the intro to one of the songs, he said "This is one of the first songs I ever wrote. We're playing it tonight because the little boy who wrote it would never believe he'd get to open for Nick Lowe."

    If you like well-crafted pop songs, Golden Shoulders is worth a listen.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wayno9:59 AM

      Thanks for the tip, Steve. I have them queued up for a soundtrack while I'm drawing this week.

      Delete
  2. Glenn G8:42 PM

    After my initial chuckle at at the mime cartoon, I had this random idea that at any moment, Barbara Bilingsley was going to enter from the left and say, "Excuse me, Doctor, but I speak Mime."

    On an unrelated note, I bowled with a guy that played bass in a local band back in the '90s, and during one of our conversations about music, he told me of the first time he saw a 12-string Bass. Nowadays, there are FB pages and web-sites devoted to them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anon12:58 AM

      Love the reference to "Airplane" That was awesome!

      Delete
    2. Wayno6:58 PM

      Anything more than 4 strings on a bass is just silly.

      Delete
  3. Anonymous10:08 PM

    “Forbidden Operating System?”
    This better be good.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. mmaks9:49 AM

      Actually, that would be the best operating system IMHO! Thanks Steve.

      Delete
  4. Anonymous10:38 PM

    I love the Fender vs. Rickenbacker one.
    And speaking of bassists, Nick Lowe's Pure Pop For Now People is a must have classic (titled Jesus of Cool everywhere but the US, where folks are overly sensitive about such things...).

    ReplyDelete