Fighting Words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(To achieve a greater sense of bigness, click the ghost at the top of the slide.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Well-Groomed Trees.

When I was a child, we fought over whose dad was tougher. The biggest problem with that schoolyard activity is that unless your dad is the town drunk or an unmitigated jackass, it’s pretty hard to get him to show up to fight another kid’s dad to prove it.

These days, technology has brought snotty kids the technical ability to prove his dad’s superiority with hard numbers.  In the future, kids will argue over whose dad has more terabytes implanted in the base of his skull. It’s a wonderful future, folks. Stay tuned!

Below is the title panel that I used for this cartoon in the papers that use title panels for my feature. Family Circus (often referred to as “Family Circle,” which is a women’s magazine) is likely the single-most parodied cartoon of all time. It’s just too fun to lampoon wholesomeness to resist, I guess. I’ve done a few over the years myself.

 

 

 

The cool thing about it is that the late Bil Keane, creator of Family Circus, was a big fan of Family Circus satires and often asked for the original art for his collection. When I published the cartoon below in 1995, he called me the next morning to do just that and I traded him one of his original Sunday panels for this one. It was a fun day.