July 21st, 2013

Going Straight

by Wayno & Piraro

Bizarro is brought to you today by Self-Eating Crow.

Part of the reason I like to explain my gags a bit on this blog is because my readership is international. Since many of my gags come from English idioms or wordplay, it is common even for a person who is fluent in English but has never lived in the U.S., Canada, or Britain to have no idea what I’m referring to. Additionally, I don’t know how widely a given idiom is used. This cartoon is a twist on the expression, “as the crow flies,” which refers to how far away something is if you could go straight there rather than taking available roads. “It’s only a mile as the crow flies but you have to go five miles around that gated community of frightened white people to get there.”

More curious readers may want to know why a different crow is speaking in my panel version than in my strip version. This was a union issue. Crows have a very special clause in their contract with the National Cartoonists Society that mandates when two crows appear equidistant from the reader, they both must have a line. I only had one line for this gag so I solved the problem by using a different crow in each version. Just a little behind-the-scenes info.

Today’s antique Bizarro from 2006 is also about birds, but these are going straight to hell. My favored caption for this cartoon would replace the word “poo” with “shit,” but you can’t use that kind of dangerously subversive language in newspaper comics lest civilization come to an abrupt end.