Famous Liars

(Amusing details may become more evident with an embiggenating click of the images herein.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Lip Reader’s Nightmare.

I think it is fair to say that if the Orange Menace had the same biological syndrome as Pinocchio, Trump Tower could have been the world’s tallest structure made entirely of nose-sized logs. But enough about famous liars.

Today is a landmark day in my life and I want to share it with my loyal Jazz Pickles. January 21, 2018, will mark the 33rd anniversary of my publishing a Bizarro cartoon each and every day, 365 days a year. That’s over 12,000 cartoons. Writing and drawing that many gags consistently over time is every bit as challenging as you might imagine. Somehow, though, I managed to make my deadlines through illnesses, the deaths of loved ones, two divorces, several moves, and the loss of my favorite sunglasses back in ’92, which really upset me and that I’ve never been able to replace.

All those years, through good times and bad, I told myself that one day I would retire and become a painter, which was all I ever really wanted to be since I outgrew my childhood aspirations of being a cowboy, astronaut, or secret agent. Remember clenching your teeth and slogging through your homework so you could go outside and play? (For you younger readers, “outside” is where children used to play before the invention of video games and the Internet.) Well, I’ve been in homework mode for 33 years and now I finally get to go outside and play.

Starting tomorrow, January 1 (for readers outside of the U.S., that’s 1 January) my longtime friend and colleague, Wayno, will be drawing the Monday-through-Saturday Bizarro cartoons and I’ll be doing just one each week, on Sunday. Wayno and I have collaborated on around 150 gags over the years and he’s handled two separate weeks of Bizarro as a “guest cartoonist.” He also spent three years as my colorist back around 2010 and we’ve always really enjoyed working together. Some of the gags will be his, some mine, and some will be collaborations between us but he’ll be handling the finished product that you’ll see online and in the newspapers six out of seven days each week. He’ll be drawing in his style but will be using my Bizarro font and, of course, The Secret Symbols.

I’ll still be writing a weekly blog post commenting on Wayno and I did that week, and also posting daily cartoons from my archives on FB, Twitter, and Instagram. I also intend to give regular updates about my fine art projects as well as photos of works in progress. (Here’s a small piece of the oil painting I’m working on right now. SPOILER ALERT for BOB A. : THIS IS A PIECE OF YOUR PAINTING!) I hope you’ll come along with me, just as you have been up till now. I’m super excited about my new life and hope you enjoy my reports.

Wayno will also be posting on his various social media sites so I strongly encourage you to follow him. You can start by checking out his initial weekly blog post about this new job he’s taken on.

You can also follow him in these places:

twitter.com/Waynocartoons
www.facebook.com/WaynoCartoons

I posted this cartoon on Instagram last Monday and got a comment alerting me that it is actually summer in the southern hemisphere where Easter Island sits. I suppose that’s my fault because I failed to mention this is not a photo from a textbook but rather a cartoon and therefore not held to a particularly high standard of accuracy. Additionally, Easter Island is close enough to the equator and sea level that snow isn’t an option any time of year.

Here’s a little gag about an old nursery rhyme that nobody teaches their kids anymore. I was taught the first two lines: “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”

I assumed it was about the importance of contraception, but what was this bit about a shoe? Then, when I was older, I learned the last two lines: “She gave them some broth without any bread; Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.”

Now the meaning is clear. It’s a poem about an elderly woman with eccentric taste in architecture who starves and abuses children. So yes, it is about contraception, but it is aimed at the old woman’s parents, who never should have given birth to this sadistic bitch.

I used to live in New York City––the city that never sleeps, though it does emit a strange, snoring sound from time to time and sometimes farts without apologizing––and the overwhelming majority of taxi drivers there are foreign-born. Considering the number of cabs in NYC (over 13,500 with another 14,000 Uber-style drivers) I think one could make a mathematical case for the likelihood of at least some of those drivers being from Venice and of that subset, perhaps a few are former gondoliers. I’m also guessing that there is no law or ordinance in NYC that expressly prohibits driving in the creative manner in which the gentleman in my cartoon is. So this might actually happen. Just saying.

Some of you more diligent and memoryful Jazz Pickles may recall this gag from my book of pirate cartoons published a few years ago. It was originally published in ‘01 and I was particularly proud of the gag and felt it deserved a wider audience, so I revived it. Now that I look at it, I’m wondering if there aren’t actual services of this sort for folks with only one foot. In the age of the Internet, it seems it would not be that hard to connect folks who have to buy two shoes but only ever wear one, right?

Stay tuned for next week’s cartoon about a snowman with a penile implant; No need for Viagra, just pop it into the freezer for a bit. “…I saw him buying a Bombpop yesterday.”

I actually have a hat like this and you’re living on it. Now if I can just get each person living on my hat to pay the equivalent of one U.S. dollar in return for rent-for-life, I can retire in style and still have enough money left over to fund the shoe-swapping non-profit I described above.

In addition to the semi-retirement I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, there are lots of other new things coming to the Jazz Pickle jar soon. A new website for bizarro.com is underway and almost ready to launch, as well as some new products that we’re super excited about like enamel pins and an Official Bizarro Fan Club with all kinds of cool behind-the-scenes perks.

Until my next post, be smart, be happy, be nice, and fight ignorance and fascism. Also, check out Wayno’s and my posts this week on our various social media sites.