Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Accusez-Moi

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 

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Bob Dylan

Yes, I'm quoting the Bard of Hibbing again, with an excerpt from his 1964 composition, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."

These lyrics from a record released sixty years ago are still relevant, probably more than when they were originally committed to tape.

I can't add anything to such righteous poetry, so I'll close out this intro to the Labor Day weekend post to express 1) appreciation for all the workers who are the foundation of our economy, and 2) hope that it doesn't crash around us because of the actions of needy, greedy accumulators of obscene, unearned wealth who never engaged in honest work.


Bizarro reader Scot G. of Upland, CA, sent today's atmospheric pipe pic, which he shot earlier this year.



Scot's notes from the field:
I was in Miami Beach a week ago to see my favorite band, moe, play at the outdoor arena known as the Band Shell just off the beach. While watching the band perform, the percussionist, who is known for vaping during a concert, pulled out the famous Wayno symbol. Despite my attempts to take the perfect picture, the best I could do was a foggy image of percussionist Jim Loughlin. Even if you never use this picture, I thought you would enjoy the intersection. 

How could I not use this image, Scot? I love its unretouched rawness. It certainly has the feel of being at a live show. 


We'll never get rich making comics, but we're going to keep doing it as long as we're able, because the connection to our community of readers is a reward we treasure.


Drawing the antlers (mutantlers?) was an oddly relaxing experience. I first drew them using a wide highlighter to maintain a relatively consistent thickness, then inked around the guideline. 

Drawing anything by hand is a healthy activity for the brain. You should do it too, even if you never show your drawings to anyone.

I may have gone overboard with the art for the strip version, but I felt great when I finished it.

I couldn't resist the idea of doing a gag about a nineteenth-century French novelist as a child. Unsurprisingly, online comments were divided. Take these two, for example:

1) A modern internet joke without historical basis. Too erudite for me. 
2) I frequently learn new things when reading Bizarro!
As a cartoonist, I'm grateful for readers who pay attention and care enough to have opinions.

A wise pig can see parallels in the lives of others.

Your obsessive artist experienced much satisfaction drawing and coloring the damaged picture frame in the background of this panel.

I probably spent more time than necessary, but it was nearly as calming as the antler drawing.

Surely there must be one nearby.

Not an understatement.

The strip layout required significant shuffling, but we got there!

That's the latest from Bizarro Studios North. See you in September. 

Bonus Track

The Coasters: "I'm a Hog For You"
Atco Records 45, 1959


There was so much more to the Coasters than "Yakety Yak." This song was the B-side of their "Poison Ivy" single. Both sides were written by Lieber & Stoller, who found a perfect vehicle for their compositions in the Coasters.


Much More Bizarro Mayhem

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


    

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Saturday, June 14, 2025

Automated Infringement

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 had my first serious encounter with AI thievery this week, in a smaller echo of the recent wholesale counterfeiting of multiple editorial cartoonists.

A sharp-eyed reader contacted Dan Piraro to alert us to an online ad for a plumbing company in Louisiana. The ad used one of my Bizarro gags, that had been fed into some AI platform and redrawn in a bland, soulless style, with no accreditation to the original source. The colors and staging were the same as my original panel, and the dialogue was identical. It was clearly a copy.

We brought the fakery to the attention of our editors at King Features and they forwarded it to the appropriate legal watchdogs. Apparently, they did their job, because the bogus Bizarro cartoon has disappeared, at least from the place where we saw it.

Coincidentally, the topic of using AI to "assist" artists came up recently on the local illustrators' group's online forum. A member had fed a photo of a painting in progress to an AI platform to see how it would describe the work.

I was among the respondents, and did my best to articulate my disdain for doing anything to further enable the harvesting of human creativity.

Colleagues, please think twice before inputting anything you created into an AI app. Everything you feed it is used for its "training."

I just learned about someone who prompted AI to "redraw" one of my cartoons and used it as an ad for their business. It's definitely copied from my work but dumbed down into a bland, generic "style." With no accreditation, of course. 

I'd share the two images for you to compare them side-by-side, but that would only spread more copies of the counterfeit. Feeding any AI platform work that you created, even once, just out of curiosity, is harmful to yourself and your peers.

Beyond its ability to facilitate theft from artists, AI is a serious environmental threat due to its insane energy requirements.

Sorry to get all lecture-y. I realize that a lot of AI is nearly unavoidable since it's embedded in almost everything we use. I don't mean to be a scold, but it's coming after all of us, and I hope we don't put out the welcome mat for it!

Here's a well-reasoned essay on the topic that does a much better job than I could. And it was written by a human.

Multiple members of the forum offered their opinions in a lively and respectful discussion on the topic. One participant seemed a little too defensive about resisting AI, which made me wonder how much they might be relying on it to assist or enhance their work. But I'm of a naturally suspicious nature, so who knows.

No doubt the debate will continue for a long time to come, assuming the world isn't burnt to a lump of smoldering coal in the near future.


Today's historical pipe pic comes to us from a Bizarro reader from Nipomo, CA (the same location as last week's contributor!)



I'll leave it to our correspondent to elaborate:
My grandfather, D. H. Wulzen Jr., was a pharmacist in San Francisco who became interested in photography beginning about 1897. He left over a thousand glass plate negatives when he passed, and my father (who became a commercial photographer) spent considerable time in his later years making prints and donating the best work to various collections. 

The original plate of this shot now resides in the San Francisco Historical Society collections at the SF Public Library. Like his acquaintance, Arnold Genthe, DHW spent time in SF's Chinatown and took many memorable photos of the people and built environment. 

The man pictured here is probably taking a break from his work in the basement restaurant that is behind him. The SF library mentions that this is an opium pipe, but [that is] not so, as opium pipes have different unique characteristics. This is just a guy on his smoke break. We don't have a specific date on this one, but all of the Chinatown photos were taken in 1900 and 1901, so [it was] well before the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Historian Doug Chan used the photo in this post:

https://medium.com/@dougchan/a-restaurants-cellar-door-to-a-way-of-life-ca9332201426
Thanks for the fascinating backstory to this museum-worthy photo.


I was recently approached by a company that sells CBD gummies named after a famous stoner comedy duo, and offered a "social media collaboration opportunity" to promote their product on my Insta in exchange for some chewable samples.


Unfortunately, my system can't handle CBD (and forget about THC), so I declined, and, as always, these gags were created by a human cartoonist, without the influence of artificial intelligence or drugs.


Best of all, the pharmacy the fills the prescription accepts Monopoly money.

A colleague who saw this cartoon asked me what cursive sounds like, and I can't stop wondering about it myself.

When the criminals were arrested, Variety's agricultural edition ran the headline, Fake Fungi Fools Farmstand Frequenters.

Thursday's panel was almost a Tarzan gag captioned Man of the Loincloth, but I came to my senses.

Bizarro celebrated Father's Day a bit early this year.

The week ended with that beloved Italian cartoon character, Prosciutto Porco.


Thanks for reading this far down into the post. You're almost done, and I appreciate your eyeballs. See you next week with more visual and verbal shenanigans.


Bonus Track

Groucho Marx: "Father's Day"
Decca Records, 1957


Happy Father's Day to all the dads reading the blog, whether your children are human, feline, canine, or otherwise.


A Bounty of Bizarro Bits & Bobs

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


   

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Saturday, May 24, 2025

Plagiarism is the Sincerest From of Theft

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 


Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit—all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Brian Eno

That lengthy passage comes from Brian Eno's fascinating book A Year of Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary, 1995. It's been popping up on my social feeds lately, with some people erroneously applying it to artificial intelligence.

I don't consider AI a medium any more than larceny, fraud, or plagiarism, but there's certainly plenty that's weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about it. The effortless thievery and gluttonous energy consumption come immediately to mind.

Recently, some anonymous accounts on YouTube and TikTok have been scooping up editorial cartoons made by humans, feeding them through AI to redraw them, and then uploading video compilations to generate ad revenue. The cartoonists are fighting back and have made some headway, but it looks like the makings of an endless battle.

I ask you to avoid using AI to try to make art of any kind, even as a fun diversion, because every time someone does that, it's one more lesson to train the virtual vacuum to suck up and imitate more of humankind's creative works.

Instead, please support and enjoy the artistic gifts offered by actual human beings. You could do worse than checking out Eno's Diary. Many of the diary entries refer the reader to one of the book's (swollen) appendices, which consist of more formal essays, letters, articles, or other items related to the events in the author's daily life.

Another book made from a diary I thoroughly enjoyed was Michael Palin's Diaries 1969–1979: The Python Years. Palin is a dedicated diarist (at least four volumes of his diaries are available) and has also written a dozen travel books.

As a snotty adolescent, Monty Python's Flying Circus landed in the US at the perfect time. I had learned about them slightly earlier thanks to the excellent stock of imported LPs at the Heads Together record shop in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood and was primed when our local PBS station picked up the show.

My first thought when I read Eno's observation was the beautifully grubby textures of old-fashioned letterpress beer coasters.
This item is from the Bizarro Studios North archive. To fully appreciate the spectacular imperfections of the letterpress medium, take a closer look.


The off-register halftone dots! The blue jacket overprinted on Bert's sweater! The yellowed pulp! I may burst into tears here.

While I pull myself together, here's this week's pipe pic, a Macanudo comic strip by my colleague and friend Liniers.


Thanks to Dan M., a good friend of Bizarro for sharing the delightful comic by the equally delightful Liniers.


All the gags you are about to read were created without artificial intelligence.


Monday's panel takes place just prior to the invention of optional rustproofing.

Alternative Roman history.

If nothing else, it's a creative explanation for neglecting to refresh the moth crystals.

Real-life examples for sale, and some of the models in the listings look even more pretentious than my comic character. 

Fortunately Canada Five-1 never got off the ground.

Everybody loves to hear a halftime dirge played by a funereal marching band. Ask not for whom the cymbals clash...

Other badges are awarded for Vegetable Avoidance and Snot Rocketry.


That's it for the latest batch of handmade digital cartoons from Bizarro Studios North. See you next week with more of the same.

Bonus Track

Sammy Davis, Jr.: "You Can Count on Me"
Twentieth Century Records, 1976


I can add nothing in the way of commentary. You simply have to hear it.


Copious Quantities of Bizarro Curiosities

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


  

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