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 only way to have a friend is to be one. Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you're reading this post, I consider you to be a friend of Bizarro as well as a personal friend. With the end of 2023 in view, as I look ahead to the start of my seventh year of creating the daily Bizarro comics, I pause to consider how fortunate I am to do this work and to be part of a welcoming community of comics people. Each year, making a living in the world of print publications becomes a shakier prospect. Your readership and support help keep us going.
Thanks for all you do.
If you like, you can throw a little support our way by ordering the just-released 2024 Bizarro Cowboys & Clowns Wall Calendar from King Features. As you know, cowboys and clowns are among our favorite comic subjects, and Dan and I selected some of our best C&C gags for the calendar.
Since we're into the holiday weekend, our pipe pic is a classic commercial art image of the American vision of Santa Claus. Looking at it closely, it's unclear how he keeps it floating just in front of his open mouth. Christmas magic, one supposes.
Speaking of Santa, last weekend my band was joined by our friend Rick Sebak for a performance of the famous poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas.
Rick has produced many entertaining "scrapbook documentaries" for WQED television in Pittsburgh and for PBS. He's a goodwill ambassador for the city and a genuinely nice human.
WQED filmed Rick with the Combo backing him, and you can view it on Facebook here.
Now, let's review this week's cartoons, which include a couple of seasonal gags.
Also, Apple will build one of these in the front yard of every iTunes user.
The strip version, in a vertical orientation, does a better job of conveying the monument's ridiculous scale.
OSHA really should pay a visit to that North Pole toy shop.
In police jargon, this is referred to as a "5-7-5."
I apologize for making readers go back and count the syllables to fact-check the gag. If it's any consolation, I left myself barely enough space to fit the text and art into the strip for this one.
Our tax system is particularly complicated for the elf employed.
As usual, I placed my favorite comic of the week in the Friday slot. I enjoyed taking a detour from the usual single-panel format, and I like the gag's employment of the Rule of Three.
In addition, the strip conversion was nearly painless.
As I've mentioned in the past, I find that comics using inanimate objects as characters are much funnier if they can be done without adding human features to them. I'm not smart enough to know why that is, but I'll still defend the theory.
That's the latest from Bizarro Studios North. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope yours is all that you wish it will be.
Thanks as always for your kind attention.
Bonus Tracks
The Kinks: "Father Christmas"
Arista Records single, 1977
The Kinks brought punk rock cynicism to the holiday music genre with this wonderful record.
The Red Beans & Rice Combo "Christmas Island" Live at the Original Pittsburgh Winery December 16, 2023 Video courtesy of Sheri Edmondson
Finally, a holiday greeting to you from Tom, Dave, and me.
Other Bizarro Sources
If you like what we do, and appreciate that it comes to you free of charge, we encourage you to explore any or all of the following links.
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
Happy Saturday, Friends of Bizarro. I'm currently spread too thin and a little overwhelmed, so this post will be a quickie. We had three household projects to deal with in the past few days. No, wait, make that four. Fortunately, none were too messy or intrusive, but they were still stressful. Especially the part where we write the checks.
This illustration was made by the American designer Paul Rand (1914-1996). A favorite graffiti tag around the studio is:
Paul Rand >> Rand Paul
Now for the week in comics.
Monday's gag imagines the most sacred of vows for the current era.
I used colors to define the K2 Secret Symbol on the pastor's stole, which wasn't possible in the black-and-white version.
The color treatment worked well for online viewing, but in newsprint, it wasn't as effective.
This scan is clearer than the panel looks in actual print. The K2 and other gold-on-red details turned into a muddy mess of halftone dots. It's a challenge to create art that will be viewed in wildly different mediums and is something I'll try to keep in mind from now on.
I'm not sure if clowns would go to an amusement park for fun since their workday is nothing but forced jollity. Maybe they patronize depression parks.
The drawing and the gag itself were based on two dogs we know, a delightful pair of siblings who live with dear friends of ours. The dachshund triggers my watch's "loud environment" warning when he greets us.
When the machines take over, they'll probably want some downtime.
Friday's gag took longer to draw than any of the other five and left me craving a schmear of cream cheese.
Tread lightly if they get to the rest area before you.
That's the latest from Bizarro Studios North. Stop by next week for another batch of pictures in boxes. Maybe we'll have some photos from tonight's music gig.
Thanks as always for your kind attention.
Bonus Track
Ben Vaughn: "The Man Who Has Everything"
Enigma Records, 1990
I decided to share this song by my friend Ben Vaughn as a callback to the everything bagel gag, forgetting that the first line mentions buying Christmas gifts, so it turned out to be doubly appropriate for this time of year.
Even More Bizarro "Content"
If you like what we do, and appreciate that it comes to you free of charge, we encourage you to explore any or all of the following links.
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
Music improves the human condition.
Tim Wolfson
Today's quote is from a good friend of mine who loves music. It's a simple but profound sentiment that I think of often. I have nothing to add to it, except to thank him for all the music he shares with everyone he knows.
I'll follow Tim's lead and post some music I made with friends at the end of this entry.
Our rather blurry pipe pic is a YouTube screen grab from Rare Exports: Safety Instructions, a 2005 short that was the basis for the 2010 feature Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Pictured are actors Onni and Jorma Tormilla, who are son and father in real life. I've touted this Finnish Christmas film in the past and just watched it again this week.
Like music, laughter is also good for your well-being. Let's see if this week's Bizarro comics offer any beneficial effects.
I'll leave it up to the individual reader to decide if the dummy is sentient, or if the ventriloquist has learned to throw his thoughts.
Several folks who enjoy finding the Secret Symbols in Bizarro argued that the auction paddle labeled "3.14" should have counted toward the total in this panel, making it six instead of five.
I've consulted with Bizarro's Council of Elders who ruled that a word describing a Secret Symbol is not the same as an actual Symbol, and, although not a word per se, the number representing pi doesn't count as pie. That's just irrational.
With or without the helmet, Junior can do impressive headstands.
I wish I hadn't seen Thursday's comic as printed in the local paper. As I described in last week's post, they squeeze the image horizontally, which is painfully obvious when the main part of the drawing is two circular objects.
Sometimes a whistle just doesn't cut it.
The strip version of this gag works rather well and both layouts were designed for the path a reader's eye takes. When we read a vertical panel, our eye travels in a "Z" shaped course, and when reading a strip, it's more of a straight upper left to lower right trajectory. In both cases, the last two elements we process are the image of the dog and the caption.
I was pleased with Saturday's gag because, in a rare instance of advance planning, my original drawing worked in both the strip and panel layouts with almost no shuffling.
The strip version:
And the original art:
I only had to add a few small digital drawings When creating the print files. Can you spot them?
Art Unknowingly Imitates Life
We received a photo of a handsome musician from Bizarro reader Amy E, of Indianapolis.
Amy works at a music store specializing in string instruments. When Paul, their banjo instructor saw our comic of October 2, he said, "I've got a hat just like that!"
Thanks to Paul for being a good sport. I explained to Amy that although I've joked about banjos being annoying, I don't feel that way myself, and in fact empathize since I play ukulele.
Out and About
I'm almost always at home working on comics, but since our last post, I spent some time in the outside world, and enjoyed it!
Last Saturday my spouse and I went to see the film Married to Comics, a documentary about the cartoonist couple Carol Tyler and
her late husband Justin Green. Carol (shown above with your own ink monkey) was here for the screening and was interviewed onstage afterward. Director John Kinhart is peeking above Carol's left shoulder.
I never had the chance to meet Justin, but have known Carol since the late 1980s. Justin's underground comic, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary totally rewired my teenage brain.
The film is being shopped to festivals
and distributors, and if you have the opportunity to see it, do NOT miss
it. Also, I highly recommend all of Carol's comics. Her work keeps getting better and better.
On Sunday afternoon, The Red Beans & Rice Combo performed at an event sponsored by the nonprofit organization Autism Pittsburgh. We had an energetic and engaged audience, which made the show great fun for us.
That wraps up another report from your cartoonist. We'll be back next week with more words and pictures for you.
This week, why not turn a friend on to some music you love? It'll make you both feel good.
Bonus Track
The Red Beans & Rice Combo: "Tico-Tico"
Bonedog Records, 2023
You probably guessed this was coming. It's one of twelve selections from our new album, Breaking Up the House. Performing with my partners Tom Roberts (piano, vocals, whistling, kazoo) and Dave Klug (drums, percussion, vocals) has pushed me to work at being an instrumentalist as well as a vocalist. Singing comes easier to me, so I'm rather proud of being able to (almost) keep up with them on this purely instrumental number.
The album is now available on all of the usual streaming and download platforms. I hope you like it.
More Bizarro Stuff
If you like what we do, and appreciate that it comes to you free of charge, we encourage you to explore any or all of the following links.
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 worry is that, for the companies that shape so much of our cultural
life, A.I. will function first and foremost as a way to keep pushing out
recycled goods rather than investing in innovations and experiments
from people who don’t yet have a well-known back catalog to capitalize
on. I hope I am wrong.
Peter C. Baker
Last week the New York Times ran an insightful article by Peter C. Baker on artificial intelligence and its use in the creation of the recently released Beatles record "Now and Then." Baker is a fan of the group's music and enjoyed the heavily processed single and its accompanying promotional video, but the project raises questions about how A.I. could affect the arts.
I'm not here to critique "Now and Then," and have not heard it. People like it, and many find it profoundly moving, and that's perfectly cool.
However, the project also portends profit-driven corporations using A.I. to reuse, remix, recombine, and simulate existing "content" to the detriment of new creative works is at least troubling and worthy of discussion. Popular culture is already dominated by endless remakes and "franchise" entertainment. If consumers are continually fed variants of what they already like, and it can be pieced together from existing materials, it will become that much harder for new creative works to find their audience.
Perhaps doomsaying isn't called for yet, but the entertainment-industrial complex is already replicating footage of actors to fill in crowd scenes and the theft of visual art using A.I. is happening daiy.
A.I.'s facility in stealing existing art without permission and spreading disinformation is another matter, which we won't get into here.
Rather, we'll soothe our nerves with a somewhat mysterious pipe pic.
This appears to be an advertising image for Amphora pipe tobacco done in the style of René Magritte, but I've been unable to find any information confirming or denying that.
The URL in the lower right corner is a Swedish blog about poker. An image search turned up just one other occurrence, on a pipe-smoking blog with several pages of vintage ads, but no info on any of them.
The following images of the week's Bizarro comics have no shortage of information, as your cartoonist loves to talk about his work; maybe too much.
The week kicked off with what I like to call semiautobiofiction.
I rarely read the local newspaper but picked up a copy this week to look at Bizarro in its halftoned newsprint form. I was pleased to see that it hadn't been reduced to unreadability but noticed that it had been squeezed horizontally. Naturally, I had to do a comparison.
The printed version, represented by the red art, overlaid on the panel in its original aspect ratio revealed that the horizontal dimension had been reduced by about ten percent. That's not too bad compared to some papers, which print the comic at about the size of a postage stamp. At least they used the correct byline.
This stageplay in question is Web of Deceit.
Fortunately, this puzzle is water-solvable.
Technology was so much simpler in the old days, wasn't it.
We never pass up an opportunity to draw Frankenstein's monster. In this panel, we imagine the doctor is conducting market research for future experiments.
We ended the week with a parent's final backhanded compliment.
Shameless Self-Promotion
Hey, kids! My musical trio has finally finished and released our second album, Breaking Up the House, and it's available on compact disc now. Click HERE to order yours.
The discs are manufactured on demand and usually ship a couple days after an order is placed.
It will soon be available on the usual download and streaming platforms. That requires extra work (and extra money) clearing licenses and paying the distributor, and it should appear the week of December 4.
We're pretty happy with it and are looking forward to seeing how it's received by music lovers.
Bonus Track
The Rolling Stones: "The Spider and the Fly" From the album Out of Our Heads
Abcko Records, 1965
One of the earliest Jagger/Richards original compositions, which is charming in its knuckleheaded simplicity and understated arrangement.
More Bizarro For Your Enjoyment
If you like what we do, and appreciate that it comes to you free of charge, we encourage you to explore any or all of the following links.
