4 for Fun

Bizarro is brought to you today by Walking Dead.

There is a change coming to this semi-daily blog, but it will be a change for the better and faithful readers will not be inconvenienced. I'm moving it over to Wordpress to be part of a corral of King Features blogs or something like that. I'm not sure why, really, but my buddies at KF convinced me to do it so it's moving soon. You'll be able to find it easily and I'll leave a link to it here, so don't worry about it. More later.

This first cartoon threw some readers for a loop, as my mother often says. "That really threw me for a loop!" she'd say about this thing or that. Lots of things threw mom for a loop over the years, but she's none the worse for wear, thanks for asking. The thing about this cartoon, of course, is that your brain sees what it expects to see instead of what's really there. The fun part is looking carefully, discovering the joke, then laughing at the trick your brain played on you. Proofreaders and editors will get this joke immediately and that's just one of the many reasons that people in those professions do not have as much fun as the rest of us. Don't hate them, pity them.

Spell "pharmacy" wrong and it conjures up a whole humorous picture. Writing cartoons is just that simple. Try it yourself, but until you're feeling comfortable with it, wear a helmet and protective padding. Can't be too careful these days what with the health care crisis in America.

I'm not a senior citizen yet, I think you have to be 65 or something, so I'm wondering if I'm a sophomore or a junior. What are the age limits? Are people in their twenties Freshman? If so, what are children? Besides a noisy nuisance that are lucky they're cute.

Everyone has had the "Would-you-like-me-to-take-that-for-you-so-you-can-be-in-it?" experience. Here's a true story that happened to me: A group of about six friends and I went to a restaurant for lunch one day to celebrate a birthday. Upon exiting, one of us said, "let's take a picture." So we lined up in front of the restaurant and were about to shoot when another person came out of the restaurant and said, "Would you like me to take that for you so you can be in it?" The photographer agreed, gave him the camera and joined the rest of us. As he was about to shoot, a woman came out of the restaurant and said to him, "Would you like me to take that for you so you can be in it?" He shrugged, agreed, handed her the camera and promptly walked off down the street.

The humor was in the look on the second Good Samaritan's face.

If you'd like to view any of these cartoons on groovy products, click the names below:
Prefectionist
Farmacy
Senior Center
Painting
Burqa Photo
Senior Moment

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Cat Diary

(Click the word "click" for a larger image!)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Valentine Wishes.

I don't often do sequential jokes but here is one now. Just look a couple of inches above where you are looking now. I don't have a lot to say about it, so let's talk about something else.

Did you ever get one of those emails that has been going around for ten years or so about the cat and dog diary? I've gotten it many times over the years, it's one of those email jokes that just goes around and around. Well, the fun thing is that it started with one of my cartoons.

I wrote "Finding the Cat's Diary" in 1995 and sometime shortly after, people began altering and adding to it to create the email joke. It's now become something of a meme, which I must admit I think is kind of cool. It doesn't mean fame or fortune – I don't get royalties on its use or even credited for the original idea – it just means that I created something that got into people's heads enough that it was passed virally to enough folks that it became generally well known. Creative people like that kind of thing.

If you Google "pet diary" or "cat diary," you'll come across dozens of sites that post variations of this theme, featuring diaries by a cat and a dog, most of which start with a few lines from this cartoon. A guy named Allen Roland even took credit for writing it on a Salon.com blog. Kind of lame. It has ended up on some products, too, for which I could likely sue. Hmmm.

I'm also proud of it because I think it's a particularly good cartoon. Hope you like it, too. If you don't, just keep it to yourself. Like most people outside of politics, I'm capable of both pride and hurt feelings.

Get groovy schwag with these cartoons on them here:
Cat Diary
Remote Control

Bowl Wrapup

(You can find this cartoon on fine products here.)


Bizarro is brought to you today by Just My Luck.

A quick Monday morning update for you before I commence to feverishly inking cartoons in an attempt to reduce the amount of time by which I am late on my deadline this week.

Last night's Super Bowl was a good game and the correct team won. Sorry to all my Pittsburgh readers, I love your city and people (honestly, I've visited many times and say nothing but nice things about PBgh) and I even like Mike Tomlin, the Steeler's coach and Terry Bradshaw, the Steeler's patron saint. But the last thing your current quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger needs is another Super Bowl ring. At least not until he stops abusing women. Some of you might say, "But Dan, Ben was acquitted. What happened to 'innocent until proven guilty?'" to which I would say, "You're thinking of the U.S. justice system. This is my personal blog and I'm pretty convinced Big Ben is scum."

So congratulations to the fine folks of Green Bay Wisconsin for getting to have a big parade for the guys who won the trophy for you even though none of them are from there or would live there if they were not being paid millions of dollars to do so. And congratulations to the fine folks of Pittsburgh for not having to put up with an expensive and messy parade. It really screws with traffic.

I think the halftime show was also worth commenting on. When I heard that something called "The Black Guy Pees" was performing, I feared another "wardrobe malfunction" catastrophe like a few years back. This country is still reeling from the moral consequences of a nipple being shown on television for .5 seconds and I'm not sure we could withstand another one. (If god had meant for people to be showing their filthy parts on television, we would have been born with TV cameras facing our pee pee place.) But as it turned out, this year's show was just four space people singing while quite a lot of batteries danced around the field. If the lights of your home flickered last night, that's likely why.

Even if you didn't watch the game and think football is dumb, I hope you enjoyed this post-game wrap up.
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Snake

I'll be posting some new cartoons tomorrow but for today I offer you this photo which just came in from a reader who calls herself Snakesmommy. This is her pet python, Louise, and she is shown here enjoying a Bizarro cartoon about a trained snake act in the circus. The cartoon appears in "The Best of Bizarro" and "Life is Strange and So Are You, a Bizarro Sunday Treasury" is featured in the background. I have no background info on the blue ring.

If you'd like to send me photos of your pets with Bizarro cartoons, please do so. Who's going to stop you and why should they try? It's really none of their business.

To see this cartoon up bigger, click on the left breast pocket of the animal trainer.













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Crazy Couch

Bizarro is brought to you today by Dog Walker.

Have you ever been up sh*t creek without a paddle? (I cleverly added the * to that word so that it would be family friendly. Everyone knows that children are no good at Wheel of Fortune.)

Of course you have, we all have. And the message of this cartoon is to pay more attention to your paddle than to your wardrobe. Of course, if you're up sh*t creek without a paddle, this advice is useless. And if you're out canoeing in one of those smiley face shirts, you deserve whatever you get because everybody hates those things. Unless you're wearing it ironically, in which case you probably deserve to be visited by hillbillies, ala Deliverance. (Wow, that was bitter. I didn't know until I typed this how much pent up aggression I have toward ironic shirts.)

This cartoon about light reading is a bit of nonsense with no particular message. Unless it would be that if you find yourself bored enough to read the ends of light bulbs over and over, it's probably time to quit your job, leave your wife, and go on a violent odyssey of some sort, ala Going Native, by Stephen Wright. (One of my favorite books, but not written by the Steven Wright who is a stand-up comedian and not funny.)

As long as we're discussing my damaged psyche, let's take a quick visit to Sigmund's Couch. I quite like this old cartoon from 1997, written and drawn two years after my divorce and the most therapy-intensive period of my life. Notice you can read "ID" on the sign above the door to rhyme with "bid," which is a Freudian term! Hahahahahahah! Also notice that back then I was often drawing the cartoon outside the borders. I did it because I liked it, I stopped doing it for reasons unknown. Probably laziness.

Let's hear it from all those readers who have enjoyed psychotherapy at some point in their lives. I only go when I'm really troubled, but I have to admit I love it. Something so soothing about talking about myself for 45 minutes without fear of interruption.

If you'd like to see these cartoons on various fine tidbits of merchandise, just click the 'toon. It's fun and painless!

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Wind Spitting

(To see these cartoons bigger, click them. To find this McDonalds cartoon on fine merch, click here.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Childhood Dreams.

Today we have two cartoons about clowns. One from now and one from 1997.

I'm one of those people who think that clowns are creepy as hell. I've never found graphic representations or photos of clowns creepy, just the live version, the person dressed like a psycho getting in your face and trying to make you laugh. Even as a child I instinctively did not trust people in costumes. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, clowns, you name it. I couldn't help but think that if they meant me no harm they would not be concealing their identity. It's as simple as that.

Ronald McDonald is perhaps the most malevolent clown of all. The fact that the sort of worldwide cruelty and destruction that the McDonald's corporation is responsible for is represented by a clown is like something from a horror movie. They guy owns thousands of things called slaughter houses, for one thing. "Slaughter" isn't a funny word. I wont' go into a lot of detail, but the animal cruelty, environmental destruction and international health crises that are wrought by cheap hamburgers and chicken parts is a holocaust. I know it's the way the world works and it will not likely ever change, I'm just saying it sends chills down my spine.

I drew the McDonalds cartoon shortly after CHNW and I spent the night in an emergency room when she was hit by a NYC cab. Hospital ERs are not fun to draw because they are either incredibly spare and dull, like the doorway I've drawn here, or incredibly complex, like the rest of the rooms full of gadgets and equipment. It's a no-win for an artist.










"Fopah the Clown" is a weird little story about politically correct language. I don't remember why I wrote it or what I was thinking, but I've never been a fan of PC language in general. After seeing it evolve over the past 30+ years, I think it is a great way to act like we're doing something to end discrimination without really doing anything. Seems to be little more than lip service.

I could be wrong and probably am. I'm just one man spitting into the wind on a blog, as usual. Please come back and watch me spit some more next week.

Hope the rest of your weekend is like this.

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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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Bizarro Family Holiday Newletter

The Bizarro Family Holiday Newsletter, 2010, is brought to you by Holiday Gift Ideas.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Crazy Quanza, and Happy New Year to you all! Well, it is hard to believe that another year has passed here at Bizarro Headquarters, it certainly was a full one and brought many blessings!

Going all the way back to last spring, we received the wonderful news that my eldest daughter, Krapuzar, was getting married even though she was neither pregnant nor getting ugly. Having long ago become convinced that she was a lesbian, this was a shock to the entire family. And the best news of all was that the young man she married is not an asshole in any way, shape, or form. I don't think he even has an asshole, that's how special he is! We couldn't love him more, unless he were rich.

My youngest daughter, Krelspeth, had a very blessed year, too, as she did not add a single letter or piece of punctuation to her police record. Yes, 2010 will go down in Piraro family lore as the year that her police file remained in the file drawer throughout! Great job, honey! We all love you! (If you're reading this, call us. We won't try to find you or judge anything you've done. We just want to know you're all right.)

CHNW and I are doing well, too, and have much to be thankful for this year. We finally stopped going to the marriage counselor and so we saved a lot of money! We have also found that we argue less and enjoy each other's company more since the majority of our marital strife in recent years seemed to be centered around the fact that that cow of a counselor always took CHNW's side on everything! Even when she was caught shoplifting. I mean, I think a man has a right to complain about the cost of bail and legal representation when his wife is arrested for attempting to steal a pregnancy test, which she could easily have afforded! Don't you? Especially when that man got a vasectomy 7 years ago, so she couldn't possibly be pregnant in the first place. Give me a break.

I also received news from afar that was quite a surprise. Apparently I have a son that I never knew about and whose mother I don't even remember. He lives in a part of far northern Canada that can only be reached by dogsled and is very dangerous to even attempt to get to, and it only costs him $500 a month to live there. That's pretty cheap considering it includes food, utilities, housing and transportation! I'm sending it to him until he gets on his feet, one of which was nearly gnawed off by a polar bear he startled late one evening while taking out the trash. I feel really blessed by this new relationship, not only because he is a terrific young man, but because he could easily have lived somewhere like Paris and needed way more money every month. I mean, when I was traveling in Paris in my early years, I got lucky WAY more often than when I was in Canada. Which, to be honest, I don't remember ever visiting.

Career-wise, Bizarro has had a terrific year, too. To date, I have made over $61 from the ads on my blog, which thousands of people read every day for free. Forget about the PayPal Donation button just to the right of this post, just knowing that my copious efforts give you an occasional smile is payment enough for me.

Another great feather in my cartoonist cap is that another year has passed without some big, lumbering corporate movie studio making some glitzy, multimillion dollar 3-D animated abomination of my cartoons. What could be worse than having some Hollywood blockbuster with your name all over it and then watch it in the theaters and say, "Hey, that's not what I had in mind at all. That's kind of stupid." So, I've dodged that bullet for another year, thanks for asking.

Speaking of "dodging a bullet," I was very lucky and blessed to have dodged the one fired out front of our building last October. It seems the instigator of that particular flying piece of hot lead was the girlfriend of the guy who works at the tattoo parlor on the corner. She suspected he was "fooling around" with her cousin, to whose buttocks he evidently had recently applied a "Tweety Bird" tattoo. I was on my way to the deli across the street when I heard the whole story, or her side of it at least, and the bullets began flying. One narrowly missed my left ear by the sound of the air being cleaved by it. The tattoo guy was not as blessed as I was that day, however, as she managed to blow holes through several brightly-colored carp on his chest. Now we'll never know his side of the story.

That's the update from Bizarro Headquarters this year, hope your year was as special as ours. From all of us to all of you, may the invisible super hero in the sky of your faith bless us all in the coming year!


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Snow Mysteries

Bizarro is brought to you today by Snow.

It's cold in NYC this week and we had a slight dusting of snow, so I thought I'd drag a few old Bizarros out of the cartoon freezer today. There is something irresistible about snowman gags to cartoonists, and these are some of my favorite gags of any kind.

We begin with this cartoon based on a true story that happened in Cheboygan, Michigan in 1983. It seems that a small group of 9-year-old boys built four snowmen on Thursday, December 15th. When they returned to the site the following day, exactly 27 years ago today, one of the snowmen had been murdered by the other three, their carrot-nose murder weapons still sticking out of the gaping wounds in his chest. By the time the police arrived, an unidentified rabbit had eaten all three of the carrots and left the scene. Authorities arrested the three suspects but they disappeared from lockup over night and have not been seen since. The rabbit, a suspected accomplice, remains at large. Snowman-on-snowman crime, however, is not uncommon and most cases go unsolved.

Our next cartoon features the growing trend among snowpeople toward cosmetic surgery. Though exact statistics are impossible to gather, experts estimate that nearly one quarter of all snowpeople in the U.S. are using elective surgery to make themselves more attractive. Snow cones are a cheap method of breast augmentation and sales of "baby carrots" are up 130% in the past ten years, presumably to achieve a more attractive nose than the traditional full size, adult carrot. Snowmen have been known to use parsnips for penis enlargement, though their proximity to the ground have led to some thefts.

Our last cartoon documents a mystery upon a mystery. Archeologists are still uncertain as to the origins of the large stone heads on Easter Island, and even more mystified by their replacement each winter with big whopping snowman heads. Government officials have declared the island off limits to tourism during these months fearing vandalism of the heads, which are notably more fragile than the stone ones. Samples of the snow are gathered by scientists each year and guarded carefully as they look for clues to its provenance. Theories of the origin of the frozen craniums range from intervention by extraterrestrials with a juvenile sense of humor to ghosts of the children of the indigenous inhabitants who erected the stone heads visible throughout the rest of the year.

If you have a strange winter mystery that you think would make an interesting cartoon, write it on a 3"x5" note card in 200 words or less and mail it to:
Santa Claus
1 North Pole
The Arctic 00001

Stay warm and thirsty, my friends.





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Catasrophe Update

For those of you who have not read the account of my beloved wife, CHNW, getting hit by an anonymous Taxi last Friday night in NYC, click here to catch up on the story.

Now that you're caught up, I just wanted to say thanks to all the quadrillions of you who have left nice comments, sent Facebook messages or emails, or used the pathetically old-fashioned telephone system to wish her well. She appreciates it and is doing great.

Here now are a few pics of the healing process. Photo number one is of us in the hospital. CHNW loves to take pictures of herself looking at all ridiculous, be it from bad hair, a funny wig or hat, silly sunglasses, or after she has bounced her head off the street. So this first picture is taken by her camera and her own hands, at the height of the festival of medical bills. I popped into the pic with my extra-big-deluxe-executive lip, which I pull out of storage any time there is a worthy "poor baby" situation, for which this certainly qualified.

Picture two was taken at home the following day as she lay in her luxurious four-poster bed, ringing a tiny bell every few minutes to summon me to help her because she was "dizzy" or "weak." What a big baby. Sometimes I had to get her a glass of water, sometimes a cup of soup, which entailed my peeling the paper lid off of a cardboard container and pouring hot water into it. You can't believe how hard it is to walk into the next room with one of those things without spilling it. Meanwhile, I had to make my own breakfast, lunch and dinner for two solid days! Now I know how Civil War nurses must have felt. No thank you, Clara Barton!*

She took this picture partly because she thought that the purple of the "boxer's eye" really set off the blue of the unmolested one. I couldn't agree more, that one side of her face has never looked lovlier.

Finally, here she is as she looks today, up and around and getting her own damn soup. It's great to have her back. The cool thing about CHNW's bruising is that because she has a mechanical heart valve (from a past medical problem, not the cab), she takes a blood thinner every day. This does weird things to her bruises and the resulting kaleidoscope of colors and shapes is breathtaking. It will change many times over the next few weeks, like an over-decorated house in the suburbs of Wichita, perfect for the holiday season.

What you may not be able to fully appreciate from this picture, though, is that her eye has a distinct oval of black and purple around it, the sort you might expect a first-year movie makeup student to do on their first attempt. If I were the instructor, I'd recommend a little less makeup and a little more blending. But what's really horrific is that just today she is beginning to develop a large circle of chartreuse around it, reaching all the way down to her jaw line. In the coming days it will get even more pronounced and promises to be positively Halloweeny. I'll keep you updated.

For those of you who have recommended litigation, rest assured that we have a close friend who is a very successful personal injury lawyer and he will be leading the charge against the ironically named, TLC. (Taxi and Limousine Commission) We don't want to retire to South America, just get the med bills paid and around $80,000 for my own pain and suffering while having to play nursemaid.

















*Note to those of you who do not know me personally: I'm not as big a jackass as I portray myself here. I've been taking good care of her and have not said a peep about being put out. I'm sure being a Civil War nurse was more difficult than what I've been dealing with. The amputations without anesthesia alone were probably a major buzzkill.


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Piglet Pokey

Bizarro is brought to you today by The Magic of Ham.

Today's post features two old cartoons from the late 1900s, which I came across while searching for something else. I really like both of these cartoons because they take well-known topics and combine them in new, thought-provoking ways. Neither of them really mean anything, although they kind of seem like they might.

This is also the trick to great song lyrics. Take a song like "Losing My Religion" (or almost anything by REM) and try to figure out exactly what it means. It's relative nonsense, but you relate to it somehow and twist it into a personal meaning, almost subconsciously.

I'm not saying these cartoons take on a personal meaning for anybody, most people don't dwell on cartoons long enough, but it's fun to play with that edge. For me, that's what creativity is all about.

Even now, I'm not entirely sure what I mean by what I've just written, but it seems like it means something. I should also say that I don't eat animals anymore, I've been vegan since 2002, but at the time I wrote this Piglet cartoon the vegetarian message was not on my radar at all. It can have a hidden animal rights message if you want to apply one, but I was actually still a corpse eater when I drew it.

Regarding the Hokey Pokey Stew cartoon, I was not vegan when I wrote this cartoon, either, but was still not in the habit of eating human feet. So, no, this was not intended as an anti-cannibalism message, although you can turn it into one now if you wish. Whatever that means.

I hope you have enjoyed reading these rambling paragraphs eight times more than I have enjoyed typing them. Until tomorrow, my friend...

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Apple Knocker

Bizarro is brought to you today by Those Darn Kids.

Our first cartoon today is another collaboration with my good buddy, Wayno. We're both fans of Magritte and although I've done a couple of takes on his famous "This is Not a Pipe" painting, I thought this one was original enough to use the theme again. I might get a small version of this tattoo myself, someday. Here's Wayno's description of the experience.

My caveman cartoon was dreamed up by a good friend Cliff's son, Emilio, so he got a byline. He and his dad were talking about knock knock jokes and surmised that cavemen wouldn't be good at it since they didn't have doors and would not know what a "knock" was. An odd idea and odd enough to inspire me to do a cartoon about it. Emilo's younger brother, Nicco, wrote a cartoon for me a while back, too.




Know a goth couple who just had a kid? This is the perfect gift for them! You can find it and tons of other useful products with jillions of Bizarro cartoons on them by clicking this.

Comes in other colors, too! Wow!

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Ape Love

(click on these cartoons for the biggest view you can get!)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Sexy Vegetables.

Today I offer you a couple of Sunday cartoons, one from last week and one from 2000. "Dave's Auto Repair" is one that my buddy Cliff and I dreamed up while we were tripping on Yak dung in the Himalayas. Once each year, Cliff and I pick some spot on the planet at random, buy a one-way ticket there, bring no money or luggage, then try to figure out a way to earn enough money to get home. We find that it is a real character-building experience. This year's trip involved eating Yak dung, but that's a story for another time.











I chose this old cartoon from the archives because I thought it was kooky and fun. If you know anything about "imprinting," you'll agree that if a human child was raised exclusively by apes in an environment devoid of humans, as Tarzan supposedly was, he would likely be sexually attracted to apes instead of humans. Mrrrow!

I enjoyed drawing these characters and the family photos on the wall, too. It's also worth noting that this cartoon is rife with "secret symbols." There are about 18 or 19 in this one, if you don't count the incomplete ones, like the bunny ears on the carpet that don't really make an entire bunny. I may have been tripping on Yak dung the day I drew this one, too. I can't remember. That's one of the regrettable side effects of Yak dung consumption.*

*Legal disclaimer: This post is in no way meant to encourage anyone to consume the dung of any animal. Or flesh or mammary secretions (dairy), either, for that matter.

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Cliche Discussion

(If you, like me, would like to see this picture bigger, click on the cartoon man's right eyelid.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Mysterious Explanations.

My favorite cartoons have always been single-panel magazine cartoons, the likes of which could once be found in National Lampoon and just about every other magazine in America, and which can now be found in The New Yorker and almost nowhere else. Within that genre is a canon of cartoon cliches that have been done millions of times in millions of ways: the psychiatrist's couch, the fish crawling out of the water and growing legs, the ascent of man, the guy stuck on a desert island, the cat and the mousehole, the guy crawling through a desert. This Sunday cartoon is particularly fun for me because I combined two of the oeuvre in one panel.

I love coming up with new versions of those standards, and especially doing satires of the standards themselves. Here is an example of one such satire from 1995, taken from my book, Life is Strange and So Are You – A Bizarro Sunday Treasury. The character in the water is mine, all the rest are borrowed from some of my favorite cartoonists (and one that I'm not a fan of at all but is highly recognizable.) See if you can figure out who is who. If you want to jump ahead, here is a diagram of which characters belong to which famous cartoonists. Most of you can guess which one I included not because I'm a fan but because of his recognizability alone.

Thanks for dropping by today, I've enjoyed pretending to talk to you.

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