Chalk Art

Today's Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by the Lascaux, France Chamber of Commerce.

Perhaps not one of my best comics ever, but it was done during a time a couple months ago when I was having a lot of personal problems and my head was a mess, so I think it's perfectly acceptable. I mentioned this "rough patch" on a few earlier blogs and a lot of you wrote to me with support, which was very appreciated. The worst thing about being a cartoonist (and I fully admit there are not many bad things about this job and I feel quadruply blessed to be making a living at it) is trying to come up with material when you're suffering. Whether you've got double-barreled flu, your dog just died, or your wife ran off with a transvestite, sitting down to be funny on days like that is like a cold water enema.

But back to the subject at hand, I'm a fan of cave paintings. They are among the earliest examples of the human compulsion to create. Though they are primitive by definition, they are, in my opinion, among the most sophisticated efforts at animal renderings ever created. The creators of these works understood so much more about their ecosystem than you or I could ever hope to. They were up to their eyeballs in it, it crawled into their beds at night, it lived in their hair. Knowledge of the flora and fauna they lived among was a matter of life or death.

And we have Animal Planet.

If future archaeologists find only one piece of art that I have drawn about my life, I hope it's the bottle of scotch and cigar that I drew with chalk on the sidewalk in front of my building. Some loves last forever.