Spider Person

Bizarro is brought to you today by Heavy Traffic.

I've never held a tarantula, but I used to see them in the wild every now and then when I lived in Oklahoma and Texas. The first time I ever saw one was in 1963 when my dad came home from the golf course with one in a paper bag. He and his golfing buddies had seen it on the course and coaxed it into a small paper bag, like the kind they give you when you buy a pack of gum. (Dad had no idea at the time that they could jump many feet into the air.) He brought it home, called the kids out into the front yard and let it go. My sisters screamed, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and wanted to keep it. Apparently we were a typical American family right off of a sit-com from the period, except that we didn't have a black maid. No idea what happened to the tarantula after that, my memory isn't what it used to be. (cough, cough, wheeze, creak)

I'm not all that happy with the bulldog-man's line here but it was the best I could come up with when I drew it. Now I think, "What's your tarantula's name?" would have been funnier.

Here's a guy who only wants to be awakened for food, thus assuring him a long nap. They don't serve food on airplanes anymore, unless the flight is overseas (and even then you may not be willing to call what they serve "food") or if you're up front in Snooty Class. I'd like to suggest that right now, all of us who are relegated to flying coach send out very bad vibes to everyone who flies First Class. Just take a moment to close your eyes and hate them and wish them ill fortune. It won't bother them in the least and they'll never even know we did it, but it might make us feel better.

I admit that there have been a ton of eye doctor jokes with funny messages in the eye chart. I've done a few myself. But something about this one made me feel it was different enough to warrant dusting off the motif again so here it is. All he wants is a laugh. Let's give him one now, shall we? Just throw your head back and laugh like a psychotic sausage vendor.

Now, don't you feel better?

By the way, to buy these cartoons on products, just click the cartoon!!!

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Punny

(To see this cartoon in all its large, detailed glory, click the caveman's over-hanging brow.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Reader Appreciation.

Here is number 12 in my occasional series of "Sunday Punnies." If you missed the first 11, click here.

The deal is that readers send me their puns and I use some of them for these kinds of cartoons. If you've got a pun that you think might be good, post it in the comments section of this blog or email it to me. My email address can be found on Bizarro.com. Please don't abuse it, its feelings get hurt rather easily.

Rules and notable things:
1. You get no compensation other than the delirious thrill of seeing your idea in the funnies.
2. Tell me what name you want me to sign it with if I pick your pun.
3. It has to be original. Don't be sending me no dang thang you heard at the beauty parlor or on the Interwebs.
4. I will not post the puns that people leave in the comments section, so don't expect to see them listed there and don't be afraid to leave me your name or email or whatever. I'm good at keeping secrets.
5. If you are Joe Flacco, don't bother leaving a pun, I won't use it. You and your Baltimore Ravens knocked the Kansas City Chiefs out of the playoffs and upset my dad.

That's about it. Any time you have a couple minutes to spare and want to LOL outloud, I hope you'll drop by this blog. I post 3 or 4 times a week and feature new cartoons, old ones, odd videos, funny pictures of me and my clan, and peculiar musings from the inner recesses of my brain goo. Thanks for stopping by.

To see some of the past Sunday Punnies, click here. For real this time.

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Thoughts

Bizarro is brought to you today by Free Thinkers.

I've been remiss in my posting this week so here's a batch of cartoons to catch us up. Do we have to discuss them all in detail? I'm not convinced we do.

The fly cartoon that kicks off today's show was very popular with readers according to emails and comments I've received. What can we deduce from this? That my readers are into poop jokes. It makes a cartoonist proud.

Here's a very weird and slightly disturbing cartoon about a pregnant woman. What does it mean? Why does her uterus have a voice mail system? I'd be happy to tell you if I knew.






As a result of many emails from various folks, I do know that this cartoon about a seeing-eye dog for the colorblind is funny albeit totally impossible. Dogs don't see color the way humans do so they would be pretty useless at this task. That's just one of the many reasons this is a cartoon and not an illustration in a medical textbook. Don't take these things so seriously, kids.

Static electricity is always funny, especially when it has to do with embarrassing undergarments. Enough said.









Years ago I had an obese doctor who smoked in the office between seeing patients. You could see him down the hall in his office puffing away. I always thought it was funny. You don't have to actually practice good advice to give it. That's the lesson I hope you take away from this cartoon.

Not that my cartoons are about teaching, they're not. In fact, don't follow any advice I give in a cartoon, I don't want to be responsible for your life. If you can read a cartoon, you have a brain. Learn to use it responsibly and things will go better for you. Most of my readers are already independent thinkers so I realize I'm preaching to the choir. I'm just talking to that one guy somewhere who is taping my cartoons to his walls every day, studying them, trying to spot patterns and messages, devising a path by which to live his life, running a piece of red yarn from one pushpin to another creating a giant mess that will later mystify detectives when they are investigating his gruesome crimes. Yes, you know who you are. Stop it.
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Pooh Talk

(For a big, whopping view of this cartoon, click on Pooh's honey pot.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Human Heart.

I don't normally post my Sunday cartoons until later in the week, but this one was so popular that I decided to chuck it up on the Interwebs a bit sooner. This was a collaborative effort between my buddy, Cliff, and I . He suggested the pun, "Edgar Allan Pooh," and I came up with a way to portray it.

My chosen vehicle, of course, is from Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Tell-Tale Heart, in which the narrator kills his roommate because his gooey eye creeps him out and buries him beneath the floorboards of his house. When the cops come over to chat with him about the disappearance of his roomie, he arrogantly invites them in to sit down just above the hidden body, believing he is so clever he can never be caught. He clearly had not seen a single episode of CSI, where they can catch you because you left behind a mite from your eyelash. (Sidenote: If his roommate had been CSI's David Caruso, I could totally understand his behavior. That guy creeps me out more than a hairy, talking mole.)

SPOILER: Anyway, he starts to go nuts (like he wasn't already) and thinks he hears the corpse's heart beating beneath the floor. He thinks the cops can hear it, too, and confesses. I've often wondered how he could think he was so clever in hiding his crime when the thing would begin to stink to high heaven in a day or so but whatever.

The truth is that something very similar to this cartoon actually happened in A. A. Milne's original manuscript for The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. Pooh was quite naturally creeped out by Eeyore's nailed-on tail and becomes obsessed with it. In a fit of hyperactivity brought on by a weekend honey binge, Pooh caves in Eeyore's head with the honey jar and buries him beneath the floorboards.

Believing this would damage the book's "cute quotient," editors removed this episode from the final book.

Big

Bizarro is brought to you today by Fairy Tales.

My weekend post is late, I'm sorry for the three or four of you who wait for these things. For the rest of you who just happen by now and then, ignore everything up to this point.

It is well documented on this blog how I feel about reality TV. I don't just think it is awful, I think it is ruining the world in the way that Baptists thought rock and roll was ruining the world in the 50s and Sarah Palin thinks that intellect and reason are ruining the world today.

But as they say in Brooklyn, whatayagonnado? As long as humans run the world we can expect a never-ending wave a classy quality.

Here's a little cartoon about a couple of mosquitoes. I'd like to apologize to my readers whose lives really do suck and this cartoon was but another painful reminder. You see, to a mosquito, sucking is a good thing. Whether you like or dislike this cartoon, take it up with my bodyguard, Big Rey, who thought it up. I didn't want to print it, but I hate to see a grown man cry. Especially one who has grown to the size of Big Rey and is wearing a shoulder holster. It's heartbreaking.










Now we come to my version of a famous fairy tale. I enjoy the visual and the gag well enough, but what really strikes me is the sexual undertones. If that's the old woman who lived in the shoe with so many children she didn't know what to do, and that's their father and he's 8-stories tall, how did they manage to...? You know.

To make this lurid illustration larger, click Lover Boy's little toe.

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Confusion

Bizarro is brought to you today by Nothing.

I got a couple of comments from readers who didn't quite get this headache gag. While I fully understand how a person might not understand it, I'm not sure how to explain it. I think it is one of those oddball gags that you either find amusing or you don't. There is no secret to it that you're not seeing, it's just that this guy has a headache and his wife and dog are part of the equation. If you're still out to sea, get married, sit around with your spouse for 10 or 20 years then look at the cartoon again.*

I'd like to say this about the "Backwards Caps" cartoon: I hate backwards caps. Yes, perhaps "hate" is a strong word for how one could feel about a particular fashion, you're right. Okay, I think it is dumb. A baseball cap is designed with a bill to protect your eyes from the sun, not the back of your neck. It's the entire point of its existence. It is like wearing shoes on your hands. However, if you were the only person to wear it backwards, then you're probably just quirky and individual and I admire that. But if you started doing it just because everyone else is, you're just being a sheep. If, on the other hand, you feel confident that you like the way it looks independently and you'd wear it that way even if you had never seen anyone else in the world do it and tourists were asking to take a picture with you because you looked so silly, then it would be wrong for you NOT to wear it backwards just because it was a fad. And if you find that you're just more comfortable looking the same as everyone else, own it, girl, and don't change a thing. There is also no reason in the world why you should care about what I think of your hat stylings.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was wearing what I call "old man hats" a few years before they caught on with youngsters and now they have become a symbol of shallow hipsterism. But I refuse to give it up because I liked them before they became a fad and I still like them. Again, no reason at all you should care.

I hope this has been sufficiently confusing so that you now don't know what the hell to do with your baseball cap. Life is like that and we've all learned a valuable lesson.

And here, to round out our confusion, is a cartoon from 1997 that even I don't understand. I have no idea why it occurred to me or why I thought it was funny but it did and I did and I still do. Figure this one out for yourself, you're on your own.


*I'd like to mention that this cartoon in no way reflects my own marriage to CHNW. We have a ball virtually every day and she gets more adorable and interesting year by year.**

** Yes, she is a regular reader of this blog.

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Prepared

Bizarro is brought to you today by Preparedness.

If your head and eyes are not frozen solid in a single position, move them just an inch or so to the left and see the cartoon there. This will increase your understanding of my next sentence. People liked it.

Sometimes simple ideas work best and this one is a perfect example. I got lots of emails from readers who really liked the "interest-free checking" cartoon. It was the result of a collaboration with my buddy, Andy Cowan, who is a former writer for "Seinfeld". (He was responsible for their most famous episode, in which Kramer is elected Supreme Dictator for Life of all of North and South America, then has the rest of the cast executed. Rent it if you haven't seen it.)

Our next offering today is in the field of locomotive laziness. I think we can agree that the Segway scooter is an odd invention. On a scientific level, it represents an amazing breakthrough in gyroscopic technology as regards ambulation without moving your legs. God forbid we should burn one calorie more than is necessary, that would be unAmerican. But, like trans-gender immigrants, it has had trouble fitting into American society. Segways are not powerful or safe enough to be in traffic and most communities consider them too dangerous to allow on sidewalks, so they're pretty much confined to open fields and empty parking lots.

People with absolutely no sense of vanity occasionally use them for security purposes at malls or airports, but what was once predicted to be the biggest thing since indoor plumbing has mostly become an expensive novelty. I have no compunction about looking ridiculous, so I ride these things any time I can hijack one. I don't own one, of course, but they're fun to buzz around on when you can get hold of one. I kind of feel sorry for them, like trans-gender immigrants.

For some reason, the Interest-Free Checking gag reminded me of an old favorite of mine from 1997, so here it is. Again, I like the simplicity of it. I hope you do, too.

We're expecting another big snow storm tomorrow, so I've got to get to the gun store today and stock up on weapons and ammo in case there is a run on supplies at the corner food shop. Good Americans can never be too prepared.


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Zombie Fools Day

Bizarro is brought to you today by a 20% Chance of Snow Flurries.
What better day to talk about April 1, 1997 than January 8, 2011? Mankind may never know, so let's talk about it today.

Somebody in the National Cartoonists Society decided back in late '96 that it would be fun to get all the syndicated cartoonists to switch strips on April Fool's Day, '97 and not tell anyone, as a joke on readers everywhere. Not all of the artists cooperated, of course, but plenty did and the funny pages everywhere were full of comics drawn by the wrong person that day. You can imagine the laughter, knee slapping, and dumbfounded drooling that ensued all across North America. (Neither can I, but play along.) The way it worked is that each participating artist was assigned another feature to draw and their own feature was assigned to someone else. None of these were direct swaps.

Here are the two results I was involved in (click the pics for a larger view.) I was asked to draw Greg Evan's strip, "Luann," and Bill Griffith of "Zippy" was asked to draw Bizarro. If you're interested in seeing more of these legendary swaps, go here: April Fools Cartoons 1997.

Next, Let's talk about last Sunday's wide-screen, technicolor, panoramic Bizarro comic. Because I'm a semi-public figure, I am connected to a lot of people on Facebook. So I get about eleventy dozen requests a day to sign onto some kind of cause or page that aims to end a crisis or petition to ask someone to stop doing something or start doing something or think about what they're doing. It's mind boggling. And my mind already has a tendency toward bogglation. I could be wrong but I can't imagine a Facebook page ever solved anything other than getting Betty White to host SNL. So this cartoon is the result of the boggling caused by the godzillian FB requests I get everyday. You can't fight Zombies with Facebook: words to live by.

(again, click the cartoon below for a view that achieves largerness)












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Lessons for 2011

Bizarro is brought to you today by Save The Date.

This is my first post of the new year, 2011, unless you count the two posts I did on January 2nd, which could technically qualify as posts in the new year if you want to get all literal about it. One of those, entitled "Plans for 2011" was one of my better efforts, I think, so if you haven't read that yet, please do. I hope, with all humility, that it makes you smile. Or at least twitch in a positive way, no worse off than you were before you began.

Today's offerings are lessons for us all in the new year. In the first cartoon, we see a gentlemen mistaking a dog which has been trained to assist the disabled for a common waiter. Shame on him. The day after this cartoon appeared in papers, I received an email from a person whose living is assisted by a service dog, wishing to place shame on me for drawing this cartoon. Let this be a lesson to us all in the new year: never do anything that might be misinterpreted by anyone on earth.

Our next cartoon is about smart rodents and smart phones. Because of the size relationship between the two, a mouse or rat could use a smart phone as a big screen TV. Like the one your brother-in-law has so he can watch those crappy reality shows he and his ugly wife are hooked on. Like you really need to see Kim Kardashian's butt LARGER than actual size. But our clever little rats have chosen a classic Mickey Mouse cartoon. Good for them. Let this be a lesson to us all: I hate the fact that I even know who Kim Kardashian is. What is wrong with America?

This doctor cartoon is silly. It is a play off the expression, "Money doesn't grow on trees." If you are reading this and saying to yourself, "I have never heard this term, wtf does it mean?" you are likely from another country. That's fine, we like foreign readers here at Bizarro Headquarters. The term is used for situations in which a person is wasting something. If your stupid brother-in-law with the ugly wife buys a new pair of shoes every week and throws the old ones in the trash, his wife might say, "Hey, Rick. Money doesn't grow on trees." Let this be a lesson to us all: Don't say this to your husband if he is a foreigner.

If you would like to see the cartoon I published on New Year's Eve, just look to your left right now. I have used a bit of an Escher-like trick here in turning the pub sideways, to indicate that the gentleman on the street has had too much to drink. Like all teenagers (and anyone of any age who enjoys marijuana), I really love M.C. Escher's work. I have done a number of cartoons based on him and have found that while publishing a cartoon about Escher is considered legal satire, the Escher family is really tight-fisted about letting you use them for anything else. Like if you put one on a T-shirt for sale, they'll sue you.

This last cartoon is one I did in 1997, which I believe would make M.C. himself twitch appreciatively. But don't expect to get it on a T-shirt. The Escher family doesn't want to share even a few hundred of the millions of dollars they have made on their relative's talent. Let this be a lesson to us all: Be born with a talented relative who will leave you his estate so you never have to do any work other than stopping other people from using their talents to comment on him.

That's all the lessons for today. I hope your 2011 is full of rapturous and indescribable joy and prosperity the likes of which no mere mortal has every experienced and lived to tell the tale.

And don't forget to save the date, of course. You'd hate to be out of town at some boring seminar for work on a day like this.

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Plans for 2011

(Why don't you click this cartoon and make it larger. Are ya chicken?)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Vintage Eyewear.

Welcome to 2011, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and undecided. It's going to be a fabulous, futuristic year, I can just tell. How do I know? Well, for one thing, 363/365ths of the year is still in the future. What does that tell you?

I'm not one to make new year's resolutions because I drink so heavily that by January 3rd I can never remember what it was that I was going to resolve to do, but here are some things I am looking forward to doing in 2011. I hope you'll join me.

1. Learn to fly. I'm not talking about in a plane –– who can afford all those costly lessons and the big metal machine itself? Not a middle-rate cartoonist like me, I assure you. So I'm going to learn to fly using my mind. Scientists estimate that the average person uses only 10% of his brain. I'm pretty sure I used that much just trying figure out how to set up my Facebook page, but that means I've got 90% of it left to dedicate to flying. I'm going to start working on it tomorrow, which means I'll have to dress pretty warmly.

2. Write, produce, direct and star in an Academy Award winning film. This is something I've been wanting to do since I was a kid. I'm not getting any younger, so this is my year. If you're a member of the academy, please vote for me next December or whenever it is that that happens.

3. Invent teleportation. I think this could be big. For years, people have been complaining about how crappy the airlines have gotten, well wouldn't it be cool if we didn't need them at all? We could just push a little pocket remote or something and appear wherever we wanted to like magic? I think it would really catch on. Of course, those of us who have learned to fly with our mind might still take that option from time to time if the weather is nice and we want to see the sights.

4. Clean my motorcycle. I ride my motorcycle all the time in good weather and I kind of neglected keeping it clean and shiny last year. I'm going to keep up with that in 2011.

5. Change some football rules. I like to tape football games (college and NFL) and play them back while I'm inking and coloring cartoons. It's mindless entertainment, something I don't really have to watch all the time, I can just look up when I hear the announcers getting excited. But some of the rules need changing. One is that if you act too much like an orangutan, you get thrown out of the game and can never play again. I don't like it when somebody makes a good tackle or scores a touchdown, then beats his chest and bares his teeth and stomps around like King Kong. It's just not good sportsmanship. I say, let your skills do the talking and skip the drama. This new rule will put an end to that.
Another is that if a referee makes a bad call and they don't reverse it after I see the slow motion replay, they get fined. While I'm at it, I'll make it so the money they pay comes to me.

I think that's all I am planning for the new year but it is after noon so I'm pretty drunk, so who knows, I may be forgetting something. If you've made resolutions for the new year, make sure it isn't to join a gym and get in shape, because statistics show that the gym will be super crowded by people like you for the first couple of months, then you and everyone else will stop going but you'll have to send money to the gym every month for a long time. That's their secret business plan. For the rest of the year you'll not only hate yourself for being out of shape, but also for being $? a month poorer. A better way to stay in shape is to steal someone's purse three times a week. It encourages you to run like hell and you'll make a few bucks each time.



















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Four for Fun

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ghostbusters, 33 A.D.

What are your plans for New Year's Eve? My plans include food, drink and my sofa. Leaving the house on NYE in NYC is as attractive to me as trying to tie a bonnet on the head of a wild gorilla. It might make for some good pictures but it isn't worth the risk.

Here are four cartoons from last week's Bizarros as they appeared in newspapers. I got a few emails from readers who enjoyed the "outside the box" gag, but none from anyone who objected to it. When I do funeral gags, I often get mail from someone who had recently attended a funeral and that consequently found my cartoon a painful reminder. I sympathize, but dark humor always carries that risk and I believe that laughing at tragedy is a valuable part of the human psyche, so I soldier on.

My editors and I worried that I might get some negative feedback from the "Family Outing" cartoon, especially since it ran right before Christmas. Most of my readers enjoy this kind of irreverence but some are offended by anything that might cause them to have to explain something to their children that they find uncomfortable. (If you are one of these kinds of parents, drop me an email, I'd be happy to tell you how to deal with these things. The technique is called "The Simple Truth," and you'd be surprised how easy it is and how well it works.)

Still others are only sensitive about controversial issues during holidays, which mystifies me beyond my comprehension. I could go crazy trying to predict all of those points of view so I just print the ones I think are funny when I think of them and put on my comedy helmet to deflect the potential poo storm.

"Check/Background Check" is a dating gag. Nothing new to report about this one except that it is a good idea to run a background check on anyone you intend to date more than once. Especially my cousin Keith, who is a complete tool and will destroy your credit, ladies.

My "Gettysburg Tweet" cartoon got lots of positive response and I am grateful, for I, too, really like it. One reader told me I got the quote wrong, however. Apparently the correct verbage is "fathers," not "forefathers." Before I drew this one, I looked it up to get it right but then threw "forefathers" into it somehow. Maybe my brain was regurgitating part of one of the Tea Baggers favorite catch phrases. Or maybe I just slept through my 7th grade history classes too often. At the time, I couldn't imagine why a big famous rock star was going to need that info so I just blew it off.

Let this be a lesson to you kids in school: you'll probably never succeed at anything, certainly not at what you think you will, so study hard in school so you won't be both a failure and an idiot. You'll thank me later for this advice.

Until next time, enjoy your day, study hard, and if you learn nothing else in this life, learn to recognize sarcasm.


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Holiday Gone

(click the image for LARGERNESS)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Glad It's Over.

I had a dandy holiday weekend, hope you did too. CHNW and I went up to Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary to hang out with a small group of our best friends, ate, drank, napped, hiked, watched movies, regretted having eaten and drank so much, then ate and drank more. On the way home on Sunday, we were nearly trapped in the blizzard that hit the Northeast Coast and only barely made it home.

Thinking back to Hurricane Katrina and the number of wingnuts who claimed that god hit New Orleans with that storm to punish the gays, I can't help but believe that this year god chose to hit one of the most populated areas in the world on one of the busiest travel days of the year to punish those of us who celebrate Christmas. Following that logic, I'd have to say that it is not a Christian god that is in charge of weather. Where are the wingnuts now?

The cartoon above has three puns donated by readers. If you think you've got an original pun that might work nicely in a future Bizarro Sunday Punnies, leave it in the comments section of one of my posts. I don't publish these suggestions, whether good or bad, so don't be alarmed if you don't see your suggestion in the comments section later.

Semi-interesting note about the cartoon above: I send in each cartoon in several different sizes and formats for the various uses that my various clients use variously. In one of them, the one used for the Interwebs, I mistakenly put "Lone" Ranger, instead of the punnier, "Loan". So if you saw the one that says "Lone Ranger" on the web somewhere, that's why. I told you it was only semi-interesting.

Got to get back to removing snow from my various orifices. Hope to be seen by you here tomorrow!


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Cartoon Festivus

Bizarro is brought to you today by The True Meaning of Christmas.

In case you're at home this weekend surfing the net and ignoring the holidays, here are some cartoons to help. Or, if you're completely engrossed in the holiday jamboree, are dressed like a flying reindeer, find yourself between two rounds of caroling and decided to check your favorite blog (why, thank you!) here are some cartoons to entertain your head. Or, if you're sitting in the jungle somewhere surfing the net on some magical device that needs no electricity and have no idea what holidays I'm even talking about, here are some cartoons for whatever reason makes sense in your freakish world. Let's get on with it.

1. Larry is limber and this means nothing at all but I just think it is a very funny, deadpan joke. My wife is very limber (lechers are thinking, "lucky you! woof! woof!") and sometimes does this exact stretching move while we're watching TV at night. I don't mind that, of course, but occasionally she'll do it on a commercial flight and even though I know I shouldn't, I get embarrassed. She has other painful-looking stretching behavior as well, the strangest of which is one wherein she swallows her own foot and leg, poops it out and balances on it as it sticks out of her butt. She says it's a "great stretch."

2. Do you like odd coincidences? Well, I sure do! I wrote this cartoon as sort of a follow-up to a cartoon I did about a "Mothman" super hero back in October. In this case, the insectarian super hero will be called on to eat a sweater that is smothering the city. (When you have stopped laughing, dry your eyes and move on to the coincidental part.) Here's the coincidental part: I wrote this most recent Moth Man cartoon in mid-November, drew it and sent it in to be published on December 15, which just happened to be the next day on my schedule. No other reason that that. Around December 1st, a couple of weeks after I drew this and a couple of weeks before it appeared in papers, I saw a movie called "The Mothman Prophecies." I'd never heard of it before, but it is about a legend that has grown around a fatal bridge collapse in West Virginia back in the 1960s. It had nothing to do with my cartoon but was sort of a fun movie and I didn't think anything about it. On December 16, the day after this cartoon appeared in papers, a woman wrote to me and said her husband lived in that small town in WV when the tragedy happened and he got a kick out of my cartoon appearing in the papers on the anniversary of the bridge collapse! WHAT?! Mothman lives!

Side note, I totally missed the point that cardigan sweaters button up the front. My bad. I think I meant to say Dr. Argyle.

3. Here is another gag by my friend Cliff. He's funny. How does someone in 3 B.C. know that Jesus will be born in 3 years? And I'll bet they didn't even have cartons of milk then. The whole thing is just ridiculous.

4. But wait! Here is another cartoon about expiration dates. What in tarnation? If it were possible for you to know the date of your death, would you want that knowledge? I'm on the fence about it. It would help immensely in planning your finances and career moves and you could engage in all kinds of dangerous behavior with the confidence that it wouldn't kill you. On the other hand, it would loom over you like a damp yak dangling by a thread. No matter what you did, you would never lose sight of that date approaching and even if you could forget it from time to time, you'd still be able to smell it. Hmmm.

5. For those of you sitting in a jungle unaware of the holidays much of the world is celebrating this week (see first paragraph) the term "seats in the nosebleed section" refer to seats in a huge arena or stadium, way up near the top at the back. The idea is that you are so high up, the altitude will make your nose bleed. Well here are nosebleed seats of a different sort! Hahahahahahahahahahahahah!

Hope everyone has a smooth and salubrious holiday weekend. I'm off to Woodstock Sanctuary to hang with my peeps.

Rust

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ironing Man.

A reader wrote to me and suggested a cartoon involving Iron Man's difficulty with water and this is what came of it. I'm particularly proud of the art on this one so click on the image and blow it up right big like to fully peruse it. The only thing I used reference for was Iron Man himself, the rest of it was pulled out of the gooey gray gelatin in my noggin. I get excited by being able to draw something particularly convincing right out of my head. Such is the simple life of the simple-minded artist.

It's the weekend, so this is short and sweet.

Huge Duct

Bizarro is brought to you today by Duct Tape.

I'll be honest with, I'm really fond of "Duct Tap Night." Not as an institution, but as a cartoon. I'm not fond of bars in general, the liquor is far more expensive than what I have at home, the music is typically too loud to have a conversation, and I'm not looking for a new sexual experience. It would be fun to meet a friend in a bar and catch up, but quiet bars are increasingly difficult to find and I have no desire to scream at my friends. So I tend to stay home where the drinks are cheap, the music and volume is of my own choosing, and the hot women (wife) will actually go to bed with me.

Although the idea of this comic is funny to me –– women enjoying a bar where the men can't hit on them –– it has been my experience that women usually don't go to bars except to look for mating possibilities, so the whole concept is probably erroneous. Note that I said "usually." As I typed that sentence, I had a premonition of torrents of comments from angry women saying they like to meet their girlfriends in bars and have no thoughts toward being "picked up." Okay, fine, my bad. If that's you, you'll love Duct Tape Night.

This next cartoon was drawn from personal experience. I am inordinately tall – 7' 5" – and have always had a terrible time finding clothes that fit in those Big and Tall men's shops. It could be that even at that height I am still too far out of the norm to be catered to by mass production. Or, it could be that I still have a touch of dyslexia from time to time, I am actually 5' 7", and I have no business in a Big and Tall shop in the first place. That would explain why the clothes in those shops are so baggy, come to think of it.

I'll be posting again tomorrow, but I want to be sure to remind you to check in next week when I'll be posting my holiday family newsletter; a complete rundown of all the precious and adorable moments of my family for the past 12 months. I don't send out cards or letters of any kind this time of year, so this is the only place to get it.

Prophetic Comedy

Bizarro is brought to you today by Xmas Celebrity Sightings.

Since we humans are so prone to superstition and mysticism, I could easily attribute the harrowing accident involving my wife and a taxi cab on December 10th to my cartoon that ran in newspapers on December 7th. It was undoubtedly an unwitting premonition, perhaps even a prophecy. I'll think twice before I use terms like "prescription for disaster" in Bizarro again. Whew!

Or, I could use the other 99.99999% of my brain and admit that not all coincidences have spiritual meaning. In fact, there's pretty much no evidence whatsoever that any of them do. Unless you choose to apply one, which I recommend you do at your own risk. History teaches us that superstition can lead to some pretty idiotic life choices. Like war.

T Rex has no superstitions, he just needs help in his cafe because he is short-handed. Get it? Short handed? What kind of damn fool dinosaur starts a cafe if he cannot even carry a tray without dropping it? And what does he do with the tables of patrons he knocks over with is mighty tail? Perhaps he just eats them. T Rexs can be like that.

My fanny pack riff got a few emails from readers with a better knowledge of anatomy than mine who informed me that the "liver pack" is on the wrong side of the man's body. What we actually have here is a "spleen pack." My bad, as surgeons up on malpractice charges frequently say.

Of course, if you want to get really picky, the "belly pack" is actually an "intestine pack." The stomach is much higher. Unless you want to be extremely liberal in your interpretation of "belly," but don't even get me started on that kind of irresponsible artistic license. Cartoons should be as factual as possible. If you can't trust the information in a cartoon, what can you trust?, I always say.

Don't forget all the life-changing Bizarro products that can be found somewhere around here. Perfect for holiday gift-giving!



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Quintuple Tragedy

(click the pic to make it big)

Bizarro is brought to you today by A Leisurely Drive.

Hey, I went to a holiday party last night and they had a very fun live band. But it turned out that was not the most exciting part of the evening.

Nor was the most exciting part when we left the place at midnight, hailed a cab out front of our friends' building, and my formerly lovely wife, Ashley, stuck her head into the passenger-side door window and said to the driver, "Will you take us to Brooklyn?"

The most exciting part was when the cabbie suddenly stepped on the gas (fear of Brooklyn? involuntary leg spasm?), throwing my formerly lovely wife to the street, conking her head on the pavement and knocking her unconscious.

Not being a trained crime fighter, instead of drawing my gun and shooting at the cab or simply getting the car's number, I fell to my knees and began shouting to her, asking if she was okay. She was not okay, as her bloodied and sleeping face quickly told me.

I called 911, they came quickly, tossed us into an ambulance and brought us to an emergency room at the other end of the bumpiest street in the tri-state area. With what it costs to ride in an ambulance, you'd assume that included some sort of suspension system, but you'd be wrong.

Upon entering the ER, the first thing I learned was that all of the employees are superstitious. They forced me to put my camera phone away, presumably fearing I would steal their souls. I told them I had all I could handle with my own soul and had no interest in theirs, but that reassurance seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Now in the trauma room, at first there was a lot of clothes-cutting, shouting of inane questions to get a brief test of Ashley's I.Q. –– What's your name? What day is this? Do you realize we're ruining your fancy party clothes by cutting them off because it is so much more dramatic than removing them the normal way? –– and bandying-about of medical terms like "stat", "cc", "saline," and, "Sir, put that camera away, we're not going to ask again!"

One interesting thing I found out was that you don't really have to leave the trauma room if you don't want to. I learned this after they asked me several times, rather sternly, to step outside and I simply said, "no." Instead of calling security or producing a taser, they just sort of looked disappointed and went on about their business. In their defense, however, they were being forced to ask me and this caused them fear; "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wait outside," they said over and over. "No," I blandly stated each time and this seemed to allay their fears for a few more minutes. I was, after all, standing calmly off to the side, not scrubbing up and offering to help.

After seven hours of poking, prodding, testing, and mostly waiting on gunshot and knifing victims to be treated, they gave her a couple of stitches in her eyebrow where previously there were none and sent us home, warning her to keep her head away from speeding taxis and the pavement until it healed.

They further admonished her not to get the wound wet for 24 hours, which is a real drag because she has quite a lot of dried blood in her hair. I'm sure it will be uncomfortable for her to sleep with dried blood in her hair and I'm not downplaying that at all, but what about me? I have to sleep with a woman with a face like Rocky Balboa and dried blood in her hair. That's not something I thought I'd ever say.

CHNW is a real trooper and was happy to allow me to publish these pics of her and make a humorous post out of this otherwise unfun event.

I would like to offer two bits of advice to you, dear reader:
1. If you are in NYC, do not ask a cab driver if he will take you somewhere. Get in the cab, close the door, and tell him where he is taking you. By law, they have to do it, but if your destination is not as profitable as they'd like, they will often get away before you can get in.
2. Avoid the holidays. You're safer at home where nothing moves quickly enough to knock you down.


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