December 9th, 2012

Bitter Pachyderm Philtrum Swashbuckling Drinker Teen Whale

by Wayno & Piraro

Bizarro is brought to you today by Time Magazine.

“If you’re only reading the cartoons on BizarroBlog, you’re missing most of Piraro’s genius.”––Time Magazine

Okay, that never appeared in Time Magazine. But from some of the comments that readers make, I know that plenty of people are only scanning the cartoons briefly and skipping all of this delicious text that I pour so much of my heart and soul into. So I thought maybe a phony quote would encourage them to read on. Am I a bad man? Yes, but it has nothing to do with that phony quote.

The first cartoon in today’s post should have been published right before the recent U.S. prez election, but my schedule didn’t work out that way so I changed the caption a bit and made it work afterward. That’s an inside trade secret, so keep it to yourself.

Judging by the emails I got, the elephant cartoon was popular with a lot of readers. I love to draw elephants; they have unique anatomy and facial qualities that make them very expressive. This guy looks a bit forlorn that nobody will acknowledge that he was in the room. Who can blame him? (I also despise the kind of cruelty they routinely undergo at the hands of humans. These magnificent beings do not belong in our zoos or circuses.)

The next cartoon about “Jon” can be a bit of a brain teaser. If you click on it, it will enlarge the image and you’ll see that those are actually ants on his upper lip. If you don’t get the joke, say the caption out loud a few times in a row, without thinking of the picture. In fact, think of an elephant. (This won’t help you get the joke, but elephants are fun to think about.)

Regarding the Zorro gag, I got an email from a reader who pointed out that I had drawn Zorro wrong––everyone knows he was right-handed. Okay, you caught me. I’m zorry. (Yes!)

If you’re viewing this blog from a country that has banned Zorro and so you don’t get this gag, he always scratched his signature, a large, flashy, (gay?) “Z” at the scene of one of his adventures.

A friend of mine in LA, Richard Dean Starr, is a writer and editor of note who has done a good deal of work on the Zorro oeuvre over the years. His Facebook image is of Zorro, in fact, so I’m hoping he saw this cartoon and liked it. Drop by his page and tell him about it.

Our next cartoon is the sort that sometimes attracts hate mail from well-meaning readers who want to protect the disabled. I rarely get angry mail from disabled people themselves –– they most often thank me for jokes like this and tell me if it weren’t for a sense of humor about their situation, they’d never make it through the day. I didn’t get any mail from blind people about this one, positive or negative. Maybe they didn’t see it. (Direct your angry comments about my previous comment  to the comments section of this post.)

I love gags about therapy and I’ve done a million of them. But this one really breaks my heart. This poor teenaged girl is not into vampires and so she has no way to relate to the other girls her age. It’s like being six and not into princesses or horses. Or being 40 and not into tranquilizers and extramarital affairs. You have no chance to relate to your peers.

Last on today’s roster is my Sunday comic from this week, which features a collaborative effort with my good buddy and talented colleague, Dan McConnell. If you’ve never heard of the “Lassie” series of books, TV shows, and movies, you’re not missing much but you might miss the point of this gag. The deal is that Lassie was a super-genius collie who followed around a curious little idiot boy named Timmy. Timmy was a typical boy in that he was always getting his head stuck under an abandoned car in a ditch just as the water began to rise, or getting his leg trapped in an abandoned mine as the walls crumbled around him, or, yes, falling down a well. If it weren’t for Lassie’s uncanny ability to bark out commands to Timmy’s guardians and government officials, Timmy would have been dead by age 3. In this cartoon, however, Lassie’s bark diction is wanting and Timmy’s dad or uncle or probation officer or whatever is confused. Poor Timmy. By now he sleeps with the fishes.

I hope you enjoyed this stupid thing I do for a living. If you did, grab a few of my books as holiday gifts or just for yourself. I don’t make a penny off these damn blog posts, you know.