July 15th, 2013

Storming Stuff

by Wayno & Piraro

(Want a bigger cartoon? Click the hole in the guillotine.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Holiday Perspectives.

Today is Bastille Day, an important holiday in France commemorating the day back in old-timey-times when the ugly, dirty people in Paris stormed the prison, released some even dirtier and uglier people, and then went around chopping off the heads of good-looking, clean people. Or at least, that’s what it looked like in a movie I saw about it once. It was black and white. I think they recently made a movie about the same thing with a lot of songs in it.

All my life, including today, I’ve wondered how long the brain is conscious after being decapitated in a guillotine. There has to be a few seconds or even a couple of minutes during which the brain still has enough oxygen and blood to be conscious, right? So if the shock of having your head lopped doesn’t knock you out, surely you are aware of your face bouncing into a basket with a curious lack of weight behind it. I wonder if any neuroscientists have ever written about this? If only I weren’t too lazy to google it.

For your added eyeball amusement, below is the title panel (which we call “headers” in the biz) that I created for this cartoon. Sometimes the title panel reflects the theme of the cartoon, sometimes it doesn’t. This one obviously doesn’t. Some newspapers use a title panel with their Sunday comics, most don’t, so few people ever get to see these title panels.  I really enjoy creating these things and I hope you enjoy my creation.

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