Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Saturday, May 17, 2025

The Ink Monkey Speaks

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 


Greetings from Bizarro Studios North, where the cartoon sausage is made. Recently, I put in some longer hours to get extra distance between myself and our neverending deadlines, and I have had some success.

I'm using the breathing room to prepare for a rare side gig later this month: I'm scheduled to give a talk for the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators about my prior illustration career and discuss how I ended up doing Bizarro. I've written my script and am starting to assemble a PowerPoint deck. After that, I'll review them and try to make the presentation as non-boring as possible. Wish me luck. You know how I can ramble on about cartooning...

Who knows, there may be some material I can share in the blog or newsletter.


Today's pipe pic comes to you courtesy of Bizarro reader Grieg T.


Grieg writes:
I found these at a local auction. "Fun for all ages." These kiddies look dazed: the girl—and the boy—with far away eyes. But they look happy!
Big Bizarro thanks to Grieg for this relic from the good old days, when the young ones had toys to model adult addictive behaviors.


I'll include a few recent cartoons in my presentation to the illustrators' group, based partly on their Instagram popularity. If you have any particular favorites from the year so far, let me know what they are.


Meanwhile, here's the latest batch of words & pictures.



Health-conscious ghosts avoid sugary cereals such as Boo-Berry.

 
Did you know that Oscar Wilde's gothic horror novel was based on an ancestor of his who was a marotte carver?

If the customer had requested "ranch dressing on the side," Henri would have pulled up a chair.

For our international readers, ranch dressing is an odd American item developed in the 1950s, and some citizens consider it a staple. 

In early 2024, while enjoying a wonderful Lunar New Year dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant, we overheard patrons at a nearby table express disappointment that ranch dressing wasn't available to go with their menu items. The inevitable follow-up question? "How about ketchup?"

This panel arrived less than a week after our previous clown-based gag. We have a reputation to uphold.

Friday's panel takes place in a lab that conducts some major league research.

According to Urban Dictionary, hyberdating describes "a situation in which two people date so exclusively that you rarely see them." 


That wraps up Week 20 of the year 2025. We'll return next Saturday with more of this material if that interests you.

Bonus Track

Dave Bartholomew: "The Monkey"
Imperial Records 78/45, 1957


Dave Bartholomew, who lived to be 100, was a major figure in New Orleans music and American popular music in general. He was a bandleader, composer, musician, vocalist, producer and arranger. Bartholomew co-wrote, arranged, and produced many of Fats Domino's big hits, and his band backed Domino on records and onstage.


Scads of Bizarro Stuff

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, April 05, 2025

Put That On Your Hat & Smoke It

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


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

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


 

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Saturday, January 04, 2025

Now We Are Seven

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


Well, my friends, we made it through another year of cartoons. In 2024, I released 314 Bizarro daily panels into the wild. That's a whole lot of clowns, cowpokes, cave folk, grim reapers, dogs, and cats. After seven years at the drawing board, I love it more than ever. My collaborative partnership with Dan Piraro is the best working relationship I've ever had.

Since January 1, 2018, I've spewed out 2,251 gags. Watch for a new photo of the pile of archival storage boxes soon.

As the Year of the Snake Oil Salesman advances, I hope our comical output will provide moments of relief from the chaos and madness that will surely come.


Faithful Bizarro buddy Petri V. of Waterloo, Ontario, spotted a pipe-smoking monkey in a Simpsons clip.



Petri writes:

I recently read an article linked to a short Simpsons clip on YouTube. The clip features a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, feverishly typing away (in shackles, no less!) in Mr. Burns’s mansion. I noticed that one of the monkeys was smoking a pipe, so I thought I might suggest it as a pipe pic candidate. I took the liberty of taking a screenshot.

Please note that sharing this video is not an endorsement of the forced labor of monkeys.

Thanks for the screen capture, Petri!



I referred to last week's pipe pic as an example of "Nephew Art" and explained it as well as I was able, but I couldn't recall who originated the term.


Fortunately, Dan Piraro commented:

For some reason, I think "nephew art" may have been the invention of one of our idols, B. Kliban. I'm not sure why I think that, and I may be totally wrong.

Thanks to Dan's powers of recollection, I located the source. Click on the image to see an enlarged version. (This applies to all photos in the blog).

Every year on National Cartoonists' Day (May 5), cartoonists share Kliban's famous "Out of the way, you swine!" panel.


January 1 would have been Kliban's 90th birthday. He died in 1990 at the too-young age of 55, but his brilliant work continues to endure and inspire.


We'd never have a club-wielding cop threaten anyone, so we'll just say, "Excuse us, but there's a new week of Bizarro cartoons coming through."


Who can resist the playful charms of Bettie Kilowatt?


This character is doing "Involuntarily Dry January."


New Year's Day marked the fourth birthday of the Pipe of Ambiguity Secret Symbol, which honors Bizarro's patron surrealist, René Magritte.


That reminds me: the official Pipe of Ambiguity T-shirt is one of the fun items in the Comics Kingdom Bizarro collection. 



The Ferryman of Hades doesn't get many repeat customers.


This still happens to cartoonists every day.


An alternate battle cry in the Marvel Universe is, "Avengers commiserate!"

That concludes the latest selection of rectangular humor from your (lone) ink monkey at Bizarro Studios North.

Bonus Track

Ken Bishop's Nice Twelve: "Subterranean Homesick Blues"
From The Young Ones
BBC2 TV, 1984



Online chatter about the current Bob Dylan biopic prompted me to share this fun cover version, performed by a fictional band featuring Stewart Copeland of the Police along with Jools Holland, Chris Difford, and other members of Squeeze.

Outposts of the Bizarro Empire

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


  

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Saturday, August 17, 2024

Ain't It Funny

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


The second half of August is becoming extra busy for your cartoonist, and I'm composing this post ten days in advance, so please forgive me if anything momentous happens before this is published and I don't remark on it.


Since I'm trying to complete an extra week or two of comics before September, it's fitting to feature a comics-related pipe pic.

This is of course a Thimble Theatre panel by the great Elzie Segar. My old buddy and esteemed colleague Steve Bissette posted this on his Facebook page recently.

The pipe may be a tiny part of the image, but it still qualifies. Also, it depicts a world I'd like to live in.

Thanks to Steve for adding some levity to the Book of Face.


Here's a review of the latest Bizarro gags. Bizarro is distributed by King Features Syndicate, making us Popeye's neighbors or maybe his co-workers.


Monday's gag may have been partly inspired by the story of a patient of psychologist Oliver Sacks. The man was an accomplished jazz drummer and Tourette's patient who had a history of experiencing severe tics. When the patient took medication to control the symptoms, he lost the spontaneity that fueled his musical improvisations. Along with Dr. Sacks the patient eventually decided to use the medication on weekdays to help him function in day-to-day society, and he'd go off the meds on weekends to be a wilder, freer improviser.


Who doesn't enjoy the occasional alien probing gag?


The strip layout had a more panoramic horizon but sacrificed some foreground elements.

On the same subject, here's an old one I particularly enjoyed doing:
 

I never pass up an opportunity to draw a ventriloquist dummy.


A restaurant in my neighborhood serves a "deconstructed" Bloody Mary, which makes for a tasty science experiment.

Maybe Cousin Erlenmeyer has a wild side after all.


And their bartender makes a nice glass of slop.


That's farmcore, dude.


Odds are that this has happened in real life somewhere.


After I completed the art, we decided that the client's outfit made him look like a (smarmy) doctor in a lab coat, so I executed a wardrobe change. 

That wraps up another batch of frivolity from your humble ink-monkey. Thanks for dropping by.


Bonus Track
Huey "Piano" Smith and His Clowns: "Pop-Eye"
Ace Records single, 1962



Huey "Piano" Smith was one of the giants of New Orleans music and was hugely influential on the development of early rock and roll. He was a true entertainer, and his records are almost all worthwhile.


A Whole Lotta Bizarro


  

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