August 4th, 2013

Whatevs

by Wayno & Piraro

(For an up-closerer look at this scribbling, click the Panda’s nose.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Japanese Super Heroes.

This cartoon is a lampoon of the beloved, cheap ‘n’ cheezy Japanese sci-fi films of bygone days, as well as a comment on our modern attention span. Some of you may remember such eminent feature films as “King Kong vs. Godzilla,““Godzilla vs. Mothra,“ and “King Kong Saves Godzilla’s Life With CPR.“ Today’s sequel to these brilliant cinemagraphical feats was the brainchild of my cartoon colleague and good buddy, Jim Horwitz, whom we in the industry fondly refer to as “Jimmy Ho.” JimHo does a web cartoon called “Watson,” which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. As the newspaper industry shrinks and fewer cartoon features are being signed to syndication contracts all of the time, Jim is part of the new wave of cartoonists whose work only appears on the web. Let’s call them “New Artists.” I don’t know why, but let’s do.

I follow Jimmy Ho’s work because I think he is extremely graphically talented and he is experimental. Check out his feature, “Watson,” here.

His pioneering adventures in gag cartooning include strange jokes with regular characters, something that most gag cartoonists do not do, including myself. But his regular characters don’t pan out in the traditional way. They do all kinds of weird back flips through god-only-knows-what-kind-of surreal world. I encourage my Jazz Pickles to check out his work, bookmark it and check back regularly, because Jimmy Ho has not settled into a routine yet. If we’re lucky, he may never, so there’s no telling what he’ll come up with. When it comes to the arts, I love me some unpredictable.

As for my execution of his idea, I drew the inside of the office in my usual style but I wanted the scene outside to be as realistic as possible. So I decided to use an old photograph of Manhattan (in the public domain!!!) instead of drawing it by hand. I drew the sloth and panda by hand, of course, then added colors and did some electronic monkeying around with the buildings and voila––I got what I wanted out of the cartoon.

I have to admit that I’m not too pleased with the title panel, however. It does its job but its boring. Next week’s will be better, I promise.

Tune in to Jimmy Ho’s cartoon strip, “Watson,” here.