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.