Ancient T & A

Bizarro is brought to you today by Budget House of Ill Repute.

I love the risque simplicity of this gag and I’m a little surprised that it wasn’t rejected for its sexual content. It always amazes me that Americans are so much more sensitive to nudity and sex than they are to violence. A TV program can show a woman getting beaten to death with a porcelain sink but they can’t show a loving couple with their shirts off. Astounding.

The idea for this gem came from my bueno amigo, Dan McConnell, a cartoonist and illustrator in his own right. He assures me, however, that he has never surfed the Interwebs for naked ladies, he’s only heard about it. I, however, cannot make that same claim.  See more of Dan McConnell’s work here.

I confess that when I was drawing this cartoon, I really, really, really wanted to use Thel and Jeffy from Family Circus as the characters in the museum. I’m sure Jeff Keane would have gotten a kick out of it, but in the end I decided it was a little too disrespectful to his father, the late, great Bil Keane, who was a personal friend of mine and just about everybody’s in the National Cartoonists Society. So just use your imagination for an extra giggle.

PREHISTARROS: Today’s cartoon from the Dead Sea Scrolls dates all the way back to 1998 or 9 or something. This modern interpretation of the Venus de Milo was born out of the very confusion I experience over the American fear of sex and nudity that I described above. For my foreign readers who have not memorized every city in the U.S., Wichita is a town in the middle of Kansas, which is in the middle of the U.S.