Parting Thoughts
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno. His weekly blog post can be seen here. I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to the Secret Symbols in this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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Bienvenido, Jazz Pickles, and whatever other kinds of musical food products may have stumbled upon this post.
Today’s Sunday cartoon, above, is from a time when Moses was younger than the gray-haired, Charlton Heston version so many folks are familiar with. For younger readers who are not students of mid-20th-century film, Heston was a popular actor who starred in a number of huge-budget Bible films. He was also later the president of the NRA and famously promoted the saying, “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.” He neglected to mention that if you own a gun, you’re statistically far more likely to be killed by the things that fly out of the ends of them.
Documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore, interviewed Charlton Heston for his 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine. In that interview, Heston attributed the outsized gun violence in the U.S. compared to other developed nations to the fact that we have more “ethnicities,” and referenced the “trouble” with the civil rights movement. He refused to elaborate but it certainly sounded like he felt we needed guns to protect ourselves from non-whites. Ouch.
Below is a cartoon I published in 2008. I got a few pieces of hate mail from NRA types.
That lunacy aside, all thirteen of the Bizarro Secret Symbols are in the swimming pool cartoon at top. (Unless I miscounted again, which isn’t as uncommon as I’d like.) If you have trouble finding them, the answer key is linked above. Also, don’t miss the print on Moses’ swim trunks.
On another topic, planet Earth has lost some notable underground cartoonists lately and Wayno writes affectionately about them in his blog post this week. Traditionally, there have not been as many female cartoonists as males and we lost a couple of very good women cartoonists recently.
But before you scuttle over to his post, let’s have a peek at his Bizarro cartoons from this week…
I relate to this cartoon on a personal level. I can sit and watch a fire for hours and have often said it was the first television.
I used to be hooked on a cheap red wine from Chile called Sangre de Toro. My girlfriend in those days used to make fun of me for drinking cheap wine until I came across an article on wine that cited that brand as perhaps the best wine for under thirty bucks a bottle or something. It was one of the rare moments when I felt vindicated for my infamously lowbrow palate.
The Pipe of Ambiguity has never been so hilarious nor so undignified.
Be careful who you admire and follow, kid. It gets even trickier as an adult.
Some animals like food better off the floor than off of a plate. Our cat, however, picks both wet and dry cat food up with one paw and puts it in her mouth.
A handful of readers didn’t get this gag. There’s no more to it than turning the common phrase, “Thank God it’s Friday,” into, “Thank God it’s Frida.” For folks who aren’t sure who the characters are supposed to be, they are perhaps the most famous Mexican painters of the 20th century, Frida Kahlo, and her husband Diego Rivera. They actually got divorced and remarried at some point so this may be a somewhat historical scene.
This seems like a good time to share that I devised and constructed a Halloween costume back in the late 1980s of myself as Frida Kahlo. Below is a photo taken of me at a costume party, followed by the actual Kahlo self-portrait that I was imitating. I painted the background on a piece of board and built a kind of box that had a frame on the front and straps at the bottom to rest on my shoulders. The earring and white banner across the bottom were made of pieces of Foamcore. The banner was held up by wires attached to the bottom of the frame. The rest of the costume was a peasant blouse, knee-length Mexican skirt, and sandals.
Unfortunately, at the time I did this, few people were aware of Frida Kahlo so I spent a lot of time explaining to other partygoers who I was supposed to be.
That wraps up our humor sandwich for the week, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around to help tear the plastic wrap. If you appreciate what we do and that we offer it here for free, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. As the newspaper industry collapses, so do our paychecks.
Until next week, keep your hands alive, warm, and away from firearms.
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