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
Civilization cannot last or advance without culture. Ahmad Jamal (1930-2023)
Pianist Ahmad Jamal is one of many great jazz musicians who were born in Pittsburgh. He achieved significant commercial success while being respected and admired by his peers.
Miles Davis himself spoke highly of Jamal:
All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal. He knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages.
Jamal's example is a valuable study for practitioners of any creative pursuit. With a simple trio of piano, bass, and drums, and a delicate touch, he created a body of work that rewards repeated listening.
I think of Ahmad Jamal when I (attempt to) cook. I limit the ingredients and allow them to do their thing without a lot of distractions. I also try to keep my comic art uncomplicated to serve the gag, which is somewhat paradoxical since Bizarro is sprinkled with our Secret Symbols. The eyeball, flying saucer, pipe, and other symbols should be thought of as seasoning rather than the focus of the visual dish.
Bizarro field correspondent Derek R. brought this week's pipe pic to my attention.
It's a shot of Albert Einstein with Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, reviewing a letter they sent to Franklin Roosevelt following the 1938 discovery of nuclear fission. The two scientists warned FDR of the potential for the development of extremely powerful and destructive weapons using nuclear chain reactions.
This photo and the accompanying history can be found on the National Park Service's website. This is an excerpt from that page:
The Manhattan Project was a highly significant chapter in America’s history that ushered in the nuclear age, determined how the next war, the Cold War, would be fought, and served as the organizational model behind the remarkable achievements of American "big science" during the second half of the twentieth century.
The Manhattan Project also raised ethical and moral questions among scientists and citizens alike—questions that continue to this day. More than 200,000 people died by the end of 1945 as a direct result of the atomic bombings. The advance of nuclear science has given rise to nuclear energy and medicine as well as radioactive waste and health problems. The Manhattan Project and its legacies are complex as the science that made the project possible.
Thanks to Derek for the photo and history lesson. I recommend checking out the referenced web page before anti-science zealots take it down.
Let's see how the latest Bizarro panels score on understatement and lightness of touch.
Perhaps I should have saved this for Halloween, but I enjoy doing ghostly gags throughout the year.
That "lumberjack" pattern is known as buffalo plaid in the US, but it originated in Scotland as the MacGregor Red and Black tartan.
Tuesday's panel isn't autobiographical. I took Spanish in school.
In response to the cartoon, my good friend Jeff shared this photo of a reference book from his home library.
Merci, mon frère!
A
caption for the eye rather than the ear. It could be considered a "visual pun" since the words "through" and "trough" look very similar without sounding at all alike; a form of misdirection.
I believe this is what's called an unforced error.
Friday's panel resulted from a sketchbook drawing.
The image of a car mechanic doing ventriloquism using a crash test dummy made me smile, but it wasn't until a week later that I came up with dialogue to flesh it out.
I sometimes watch nature documentaries, and although I've seen many examples of the mating and courtship rituals of animals, plant life is rarely covered.
Thanks for viewing our latest batch of quadrilateral quips. We'll be back with more of this foolishness next week.
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
It's only lines on paper, folks!"
Robert Crumb
Greetings from Bizarro Studios North. I've lost a few days to personal obligations, and I need to redouble my cartooning efforts, so we'll dispense with a lengthy intro this week.
Today's pipe personality is French actor and filmmaker Jacques Tati.
Bizarro Field Correspondent Frank V. nominated Monsieur Tati, and I agree that he's a worthy subject.
Frank wrote:
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this pipe pix candidate long before this. Jacques Tati as Mr. Hulot is my absolute favorite comedy flick of all time.
Tati also knew how to use a pipe as a photographic accessory, and he was already on my radar. I searched my computer file folders and found another Tati image that I saved in 2021:
Big thanks to Frank for the suggestion and for reminding me that I had been meaning to feature Tati.
Without further ado, here are the latest of my published lines on paper.
What does it say about your cartoonist that I've imagined piggy banks as living beings in several cartoons over the years?
Another victim of departmental budget cuts.
"Frankie" is one of my favorite characters to draw, and he's appeared or been mentioned in over forty gags since I started here at Bizarro Studios.
I recently figured out that the word "nanobot" is actually an abbreviation for "nanobotany."
Friday's gag was by far my favorite of the week. As regular readers know, I like to use inanimate objects as characters in my work, and almost never add arms, legs, or faces, but using books as characters provided an opportunity to have it both ways.
The panel is sort of an homage to the 1946 Warner Brothers cartoon Book Revue, in which characters from book covers come to life and interact.
As a friend commented to me, "It's all comics."
I originally sketched this gag for myself and Dan, and we both assumed it was too risqué for a newspaper panel. Later, I shared it with one of our editors, just for a laugh. My email subject line was "Probably Too Naughty."
To my surprise, I was encouraged to run it and see what sort of reaction we get. Bizarro isn't a kids' comic, and newspaper strips and panels regularly use "hell" and "damn" and make occasional poop jokes, all of which were once verboten.
So, we're doing our part to see how far "the line" has moved. Zippy cartoonist Bill Griffith once told me that he thought newspaper comics ought to at least be as free as network television.
If we get any blowback, I'll report on it here.
Bonus Stack
Here's your hardworking ink monkey with my Bizarro output as of June 10, 2025. I keep all of my original comic art in archival storage boxes. Each box contains 150 drawings, all numbered and date-stamped. When I close the lid on another box, I stack them and take a photo. Although I share the pictures on social media, I mainly take them to remind myself that I’ve completed another 150 cartoons and that I'm building a body of work.
It's important and motivational to document one's work and to make note of milestones.
The latest box is number sixteen, and the pile is the original art for 2,400 panels. That sounds like a lot, but I know cartoonists who've been doing daily comics for a lot longer than I, whose output exceeds 10,000 gags.
I'd be afraid to stack my boxes that high.
Thanks for checking in on the blog. I hope you come back next week for more stuff. I have an unusual batch of gags coming up next week, and am eager to hear how they land with readers.
Bonus Track
Fingerprintz: "Beam Me Up, Scotty"
From the LP The Very Dab Virgin Records, 1979
Fingerprintz was a Scottish new wave (ish) band whose music was solid and catchy, but they're largely forgotten today.
In July 1979, I was aware of the band and had been buying their records when they played in Pittsburgh, though not as headliners. Fingerprintz had been hired as the backing band for the American singer Rachel Sweet, who was 16 or 17 years old at the time, and was on tour opening for the Cars.
After the show, we met the band (thanks to my friend Jim, whose record store was the place for all of your punk and new wave music at the time). We stopped by the store where they autographed records for us, and a group of us took them out for late-night pizza and many drinks.
I saw Fingerprintz again at Georgetown University in January 1980, playing their own music as the opener for XTC. They were a terrific live band and a perfect complement to XTC.
Cha Burnz (guitar) and Bogdan Wiczling, former members of Fingerprintz, performed in Pittsburgh in 1983 as part of Adam Ant's backing group. I barely recognized them in their Ant-gear and makeup.
Songwriter/guitarist/vocalist Jimme O'Neill and guitarist Cha Burns formed The Silencers in 1986, and they released ten albums between 1987 and 2006.
The three Fingerprintz albums (The Very Dab, Distinguishing Marks, and Beat Noir) are available on Spotify and Apple Music.
It seems that in place of a lengthy intro, I wrote a verbose closing section. Oh, well...
Spicy Bizarro Links
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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.WulzenJr., 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.
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.
