Surreal Estate
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. He does a weekly blog post, too, and I highly recommend it.
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Bienvenidos, Jazz Pickles. This week’s theme is surrealism, and not just in art. For starters, we’ve got the Surreal Housewives of Beverly Hills as the Sunday Bizarro comic, above. Both Wayno and I enjoy creating surrealism-themed comics. In last week’s post, I was discussing common cartoon tropes, and surrealism is definitely one that Wayno and I share. I guess you could say that because surrealist art is by definition “absurd,” it’s already halfway to a joke.
I had a lot of fun creating this art. Because I don’t enjoy drawing boring backgrounds, I stole most of this background from a Sunday Bizarro from back in the 90s. I redesigned the paintings on the walls and changed all of the colors and textures of the furniture and carpet and such. And, of course, the surreal housewives are completely new, too. This version is much better than the earlier one and the joke is funnier, too. (Which is why I didn’t include the original cartoon here.)
The title panel at the very top of this page was built from a detail of a comic that Wayno and I collaborated on ten years ago, shown below. It’s been one of my faves ever since. If you’re a student of art history, you may enjoy identifying the various artists we were lampooning here. (BTW: the image says 9 Secret Symbols but I found 10. Sorry about that.)
The most difficult part about making this week’s Real Housewives cartoon was having to research the Real Housewives franchise to get a feel for what it should look like. To me, it is utterly surreal that so many people endure this kind of television. My apologies if you’re a big fan. I suppose it was only a matter of time before voyeurism became a category of entertainment. (BTW: I’ve been on the sets of a few of these kinds of reality shows and there’s nothing real about them. Somehow, I don’t think many of you Jazz Pickles are surprised by that.)
This week’s Secret Symbols are pretty well hidden so I’ve created an answer key. Click on the image for a full-screen view.
Now it’s time to find out how close to surreality Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons were this week…
Our favorite thing about fast food counters is that they provide lots of places to hide Secret Symbols.
I confess I have often envied spiders’ amazing, versatile butt rope.
I can’t help but wonder how the grim reaper won all of those Bizarro Secret Symbol awards.
Isn’t the vow of a bad haircut enough of a sign of commitment?
This is a publicity still from the upcoming film, Sham of the Damned.
Hey, wait just a minotaur there, pal.
Thus concludes our cartoon costume party, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around to help sweep up the glitter. If you like that we offer these cartoons for free and without pop-up ads, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. Your support helps to keep at least our little corner of the world a little funnier.
Until next week, be generous with your love and stingy with your contempt.
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