October 6th, 2013

Devil in the Details

by Wayno & Piraro

Bizarro is brought to you today by The Devil.

You might not think you’d find the cleanest kitchen in the universe in Hell, but you’d be wrong. If you visit the correct part of Hell, you’ll find this one, kept immaculate by one of Satan’s mop-wielding minions. Of course, anyone who actually believes in Hell likely believes that cockroaches don’t get any kind of afterlife because they are not the chosen, magical, super-cool beings that we humans are, but my cartoons do not discriminate. If one species gets eternal ecstasy or torment, they all do. Good cockroaches––the kind that do good for others, don’t have premarital sex, abstain from intoxicants of all kinds, and pray to the One True God regularly––will live in a filthy kitchen with plenty of rotting snacks available 24/7, while the others go to this place. Makes you think, doesn’t it? (If so, I’d love to know what the hell you’re thinking about.)

REZARRO: Here’s an ancient cartoon from the late 1900s that shows what my own personal hell would be like. If I die and find myself in a place like this, I’ll sure as hell wish I’d worshipped the correct god for my entire life.  This cartoon looks different from my current work partly because it was drawn before the industry allowed us to create our own color on computer, so I had to send in a black/white image to the company that printed all Sunday comics back then, along with a Xerox of the image with tiny numbers all over it that designate to the printer where to put various colors, which were represented as percentages of CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). This system was the method for all cartoon artists for many decades but it was a real crapshoot because one had to pretty much guess at the colors and there was no way to see how it turned out until it appeared in the newspapers. (I now wish I’d colored the carpet dark red.) Jazz Pickles with a keen eye will also notice that I had not yet developed my current style of lettering. You may also notice (if you click on the image for enlargement) that the printing dots are visible. I don’t have electronic copies of my work before ’97, so I had to scan this from a book of mine, Life is Strange and So Are You; a Bizarro Sunday Treasury. If you can find this one online somewhere, snap it up. It’s out of print and has tons of fun extras.