Hair, Dating, Death

Bizarro is brought to you today by the 11th Commandment.

I'm back from my vacation and gosh darn it's good to see you. If I discover any cool pics from my trip, I'll be sure to post them. Just went to Florida to hang out with CHNW's dad, though, so it was pretty chill. It's really rare that I can sit around for a few days and do nothing.

I have a business trip out west next week, so I'm really slammed with deadlines. In addition to my regular unrelenting 7-cartoons-a-week schedule, I've got to do a book cover for my upcoming "Bizarro Heroes" book, which will be full of cartoons about super heroes and caped crime fighters of all kinds. I'm also supposed to do a promotional cartoon for a charity thing that King Features is doing and a couple of other things I can't recall right now. Guess I should have been writing these things down.

To some people, the life of a syndicated cartoonist may seem glamorous and fun, and it certainly can be, but I regularly work 7 days a week, at least 8 hours a day. It wears on me, just like any other job would. And no matter how stressed or tired I am, I have to come up with enough funny ideas to fill every day of my life until I retire. Just typing that sentence made my stomach hurt.

This cartoon about the couple arose recently when I found out about "speed dating." It's a real deal that people do, look it up. It makes sense in an odd, unnatural way, because all relationships play out to an end at some point, some sooner than later. Might as well get it over with, I suppose. What I've done here is to compress what usually takes a year or more into four sentences. If you can get a relationship past numbers one and two and still find some joy in it, you can avoid number four. Sometimes.

This old cartoon from my archives is one that has seriously dated itself. When I drew it, in 1996, people still carried "beepers." (More accurately called "pagers.") People under a certain age won't even know what those were. I thought I'd be happy to see them go because the beeping was an annoyance, but the electronic-super-fly-disco ringtones of today are even worse in my opinion.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer today. I'm overwhelmed with re-entry. Ugh.

Men, Women, Honey, Apes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Extra Protection.

I'm taking some time off from the real world so I'll not be posting again until next Tuesday. I'll miss you and will think of you daily.

In the meantime, here's a passel to remember me by. I like the distinguished older gentlemen chatting up the young chippy on the subway. Not drawn from life, but I'm sure this has happened. Just about anything anyone can dream up happens daily somewhere in NYC.

"My eyes are up here" seems to be a popular phrase lately, with lots of shirts sporting this slogan popping up on the Interwebs. Or maybe they've been around for a while and I've not been aware of it. I'm not a boob man, myself, so maybe I'm just out of the loop.

When I was a small kid in the 60s, beehive hairdos were all the rage. Now, they still remain the rage among certain retro hipsters like Pentecostals and the wives of elderly astronauts. My early work featured almost exclusively beehive hairdos. They're funny to draw and, let's face it, funny to see on real people. Sorry if I've offended any beehive-wearing readers, it's just my opinion. You probably think pink-streaked hair and multiple lip and nose rings are funny. And you'd be right.

And today's elderly cartoon from the last millennium is about King Kong's kid. Poor Prince Kong. When I drew this, I remember being careful to judge the scale between the ape and the trees so he'd look huge, but smaller than his dad.

Hope you all have a week of rainbows and butterflies. Please visit next Tuesday for another episode of "The Adventures of Whatever it is This Blog is Supposed to be About."


.

God & Family

Bizarro is brought to you today by Important Information.

One day I was tweeting something and I thought it might be fun to open up a new Twitter account under the name "God" and tweet stuff like this. The name had already been taken, of course, probably about 18 seconds after Twitter was invented. I don't follow God on Twitter so I can't say what he/she is using it for. Other examples of what I might have tweeted as God:

Just cured a guy of leprosy, gave about 7 million other people cancer.

I could stop wars anytime I want but without cable, what would I watch?

Dave, if you're going to cheat on your wife, I'm going to introduce her to a hot trainer at the gym.

Hurricane Katrina wasn't about the iniquities of New Orleans. I was trying to teach you how to build a decent levee.

No prayers this weekend, please, I'm taking some time off.

My ancient cartoon for the day is from February of 1996. I've done a number of satires of Family Circus over the years, as have lots of other cartoonists, and I should mention that Bil Keane is a great sport about it. The first time I did it, he called me the next day (scaring me to death) and asked for the original art for his collection. I traded it to him for a Sunday panel of FC, one in which the dead grandpa ghost appears. Bil even used my name in his cartoon one time. If my archives were arranged in a way that I could find anything specific, I'd post it here. It was a picture of Billy and Jeffy talking to each other with their dad in the background listening. Billy says, "The Piraro's dad wears gold chains and an earring, all our dad wears is glasses and deodorant."

I have never worn a gold chain in my life, but I do have earrings. Still, it was fun to be a part of Family Circus.

Music, Animals, Lawn

This past Saturday evening was our Sean Lennon concert at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. It was "far out," as the kids say.

Sean's band is called The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and consists of him and his lady friend, Charlotte Kemp Muhl. Sean plays guitar and sings, Charlotte plays just about everything else in the world and sings, too. The surprising thing is that in spite of being a gorgeous model, she's actually really good. Guitar, bass, accordion, dingy dongy bell thing, and banjo, she adds to each song like a pro. And her voice is nice, too. Even more surprising is that Sean started teaching her to play music just two years ago.

The two of them were delightful people, not stuck up or diva-ish or snotty or privileged or arrogant or hairy like warthogs or gooey like those toys you used to get out of gumball machines that stick to the wall when you throw them, then slowly crawl downward. They were friendly and smart and cool. Such a pleasure.

The music was great, too. Sean's voice is lovely, occasionally reminiscent of his father's – which has a heartbreaking quality that is unavoidable to those of us who enjoyed his music during his lifetime – but is overall his own, and his songs are melodic with the kind of clever turn-of-phrase lyrics I've always associated with the name "Lennon." TGSTT has an acoustic album coming out in the fall, I'll be pimping it on this blog. If it's as nice as what I heard on the lawn at the sanctuary this weekend, it'll be worth pointing at your ears.

Afterward, in the farmhouse, I found out that Sean is a big fan of cartoons and a very talented artist himself. He and Charlotte do all the graphics for the band themselves and Sean does a fair amount of freehand drawing that is pretty impressive. He dreamed of being a cartoonist but became a musician, I dreamed of being a musician but became a cartoonist; the perfect basis for party chat.

Next month we're having a Moby concert at the farm, hope some of you local folks can make it.

Shoes,Cake,Shoes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Midnight Snacks.

If you've noticed my face beaming this morning it is because I'm really proud of this ant joke. Ants aren't particularly afraid of guns but threaten them with a shoe and they'll do almost anything you ask. The only fictional part of this cartoon is that ants don't have money. I wish they did, because with all the shoes I have I could get rich.

I've written a couple of ant jokes lately, the next one appears in few weeks, and I feel as though there may be more to come. It is because ants have been on my mind. I wish there were some clever or humorous reason for this – if there were I would share it with you now and you might smile or chuckle – but no such reason exists. I've just been thinking about ants. And easy ways to get money in a make-believe world.

Quite a few readers wrote to me asking what this cat joke was about, and it is always safe to assume that for every person who takes the time to ask a question, there are 147,326 more with the same question who couldn't be bothered to write. If you're one of these people, call my What Did That Cat Gag In Bizarro Mean? Hotline at 1-800-WTF? Or, just count the number of times the cat says, "die" and then remember the myth about cats having nine lives.

As is my custom, here now is an ancient cartoon from the same canister in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. This one is about the god-awful shape of Birkenstock sandals, which hippie types used to wear with socks. Maybe some still do. Regardless, I published this insensitive satire of the famous footwear in 1996 and soon after received a correspondence from the office of the inventor of Birkenstocks. It seems he liked the gag and wanted the original art. I love it when that happens. I wrapped it in a sock and mailed it forthwith.

Here's a little behind-the-scenes trivia about this cartoon: check out the email address I posted at the bottom of it. I was among the first few cartoonists putting email addresses in my cartoons and I was so new at it that I wasn't sure people would even recognize it as an email address so I put "email:" above it. What a dork. Also, I was one of the very first people to have a non-number email address with Compuserve. In those days, all the Compuserve addresses were long, impossible-to-remember numbers and as AOL became popular with clever letter-based email addresses, Compuserve customers began to complain. So they decided to try out a few new word-based addresses and were nice enough to give me one of them. At the time, it passed for cool.

Have a lovely weekend or least a Birkenstock weekend. That is to say, comfy but not lovely.


.

Asses, Death, Tornadoes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Fun Summer Activities for Kids.
When I was a kid, after living in Oklahoma for a few years, we moved to Spokane, Washington. My family and I were all shocked by how many people thought that Oklahoma was still just cowboys and Indians. (It's not)

The two angry letters I received last week told me that this cartoon struck a couple of Argentinians the same way. They assumed that I was implying that everyone in Argentina dresses like the Frito Bandito and drags a donkey around. The deeper issue was, in fact, that they were unfamiliar with the relatively common English phrase, "pompous ass," so they didn't get the joke. I could have had a businessman standing next to the donkey, but that would have been ridiculous. By the way, "Pampas" is a grassy plains region of Argentina.

My next offering today is one that was sent to me by a reader named Rick. His idea was a guy in heaven not fully enjoying the experience because of his "not so awful life," so I chose to show him with the outfit you see here. Personally, I prefer accordion music over harp music, but it seemed a good sight gag. I could have used bagpipes, but I like those, too. Don't miss the tiny wings, that's another part of the gag.

Let's move on now to the old cartoon from the archives, which I've made a habit of posting of late. This gag is from 1995 and also harkens back to my childhood in Oklahoma, when we had to circle the wagons to protect ourselves not just from Indians but from tornadoes every spring. In some cartoons, I depart from my more realistic-looking characters and draw more exaggerated cartoony types. This is one of those efforts and I can't say I like these two very much. Their bodies are okay, but their faces are unappealing to me. I like the trailer, though.

I had an aunt whose house was wiped out by a tornado and whose family moved into a trailer on the property while their house was being rebuilt. You guessed it, a few weeks later the trailer was hit by a tornado. They survived, but ended up in the hospital for quite a while. They then moved to a lake house and were flooded out the following year. After that, the Pentagon got them to move to Tehran in hopes of getting lucky.

Birds and Grief

Bizarro is brought to you today by Forgotten Fashion.

Today's offerings are a couple of cartoon ideas from friends. The first, the fat pigeon in the parking lot of some random fast food place, was from Rey, my good friend and life coach. Any time I have a question about something important in my life, I ask Rey what he thinks I should do. Then I do the opposite. Works every time, couldn't ask for a better life coach.

The second is from the infamous Richard Cabeza, who has the funniest name in the world. Adding the suit to the ostrich really makes this gag sing and dance. The dangling arms tickle me.

Our ancient cartoon from the dusty archival crypts of Bizarro International Headquarters is from January 1st, 1996. This was the first day that Bill Watterson's beloved "Calvin and Hobbes" did not appear in the papers. I made a joke about it and unwittingly raised the ire of many C&H faithful. I got a small wave of hate mail from people who thought it sacrilegious to make fun of the cartoon messiah, especially on a day when his fans were in such deep despair, grief and withdrawal. I waited 15 years to talk about it publicly to give them plenty of time to heal, but I'm sure many will need longer. I'll let you know how many letters I receive from this blog post.