August 6th, 2013

Ups and Downs

by Wayno & Piraro

Bizarro is brought to you today by Directions.

Today’s comic is another product of the spongy, wrinkled brain of my good friend, Cliff Harris The King of Wordplay.

This cartoon reminded me of when I was a kid growing up in a small town called Ponca City, Oklahoma. In the summers, I would visit my grandparents in Kansas City for a week and one of those days was always spent with my grandmother taking my cousin and me downtown on the bus to have lunch at the soda fountain at one of the big department stores there. We’d then ride the elevators up and down a bit, buy a moderately-priced toy (a bag of tiny, plastic cowboys and indians or army men) and head back home. In Ponca City, where I was from, there were no buses or elevators, so riding these cosmopolitan devices passed as an exciting day in the big city for me. I clearly remember that on a number of occasions, after we’d returned to grandma’s house, I could sometimes feel my stomach rise and fall, recalling the feeling I had in the elevators. I haven’t thought of that in years and it hasn’t happened since. If I want that feeling now, I have to jump out of a plane, which (unless I don’t wear a parachute and sneak aboard the plane) is considerably more expensive.

CLASSICS CORNER: Today’s senior Bizarro cartoon is from way back in the late 1900s. I still love this gag and, like my story above, it reflects the way things were when I was a kid. A few things to notice here: My lettering lettering style was still developing, I was still a year-or-so away from adding “secret symbols,” and I put my email address at the bottom with the word “EMAIL” in front of it so people would know what it was! Very few cartoonists were doing this at the time so I wanted to be sure people knew what it was. Ha! And check out the address. This was back in the day when Compuserve, a popular email program of the time, had long, inscrutable numbers instead of names. AOL was beginning to really hit its stride, partly because you could choose your own email name, so Compuserve finally launched a new program where you could choose what appeared before the @ sign and I was one of the test accounts they offered it to. I was so proud. Can you imagine?