Smorgasbord of Support
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 also does a weekly blog post, and I highly recommend it.
——————————————————
Welcome to this time and place, Jazz Pickles. Here’s this week’s answer key to the Secret Symbols.
I’m thoroughly convinced that time is an illusion but somehow, within that illusion, my eldest daughter will turn 40 this coming week. That has put me in a reflective mood so as I type, I’ve no idea where this post is going to go today.
I found my own 40th birthday difficult to accept; for several weeks leading up to it I called it various things including “my thirty-tenth birthday” and simply “the F word.” As soon as it passed, however, I got comfortable with the idea pretty quickly and the entire decade turned out to be among my most enjoyable. Looking back on it now, though, the good times are mixed with some very cringe-worthy memories. Come to think of it, every decade of my life includes some pretty cringe-worthy memories. Let’s move on.
I hope my daughter has a wonderful forties decade full of ecstacies and cringes. Those are the things life’s made of.
I’ve been crazy busy lately as life just keeps coming at me like the windshield of a speeding automobile comes at a butterfly floating merrily across a highway. Outside of Bizarro, my biggest project has been illustrating my graphic novel, Peyote Cowboy, and I’ve been wrestling with that daily for over a year now.
I originally intended to post an episode each week but the illustrations are so complex and time-consuming that I quickly realized that was unrealistic. Consequently, I’ve been posting shorter episodes lately so that I can reduce the time between posts. Some scenes are much more detail-intensive than others, of course, so that figures into it in a huge way. The scene I’m currently working on is one illustration challenge after another. It’s like trying to finish a detailed, color painting of an entire action movie at 3-second intervals. The latest episode, which I just posted last night, can be read in half a minute but took me six weeks to complete!
If you’re on my Peyote Cowboy mailing list, don’t worry if you’ve yet to receive an email announcing this new episode; I’ve not had the chance to send those out yet. I’ll do that later today, Aug 21, 2022.
Of course, one big reason it took me so long to finish this episode is that windshield I was talking about in paragraph two, above. Life just keeps coming at me and it has been hard to work as many hours each day as I’d like. That’s not a complaint, just a report. It happens to everyone: if you’ve got a fan, you can bet shit’s going to hit it from time to time.
So much of life comes down to choices and consequences. I made the choice to write a very long story and publish it, the consequence of that decision is that I have to work my ass off for an unknown number of years illustrating it. I almost decided not to finish it because I knew it would take years and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to dedicate that much time to this one project. But if I’d made the choice to skip it, I’d have had to live with the consequence of wondering if it might have been my finest work, left undone forever. Every choice has consequences, even the choice to do nothing.
I admit I used to fall prey to regretting the bad choices I’d made in the past. Fortunately, I’m now wise enough to know the futility of that. Because time is an illusion, there is no past and no future, there is only now. Right now, I’m not making that bad choice I made 15 years ago so why ruin a perfectly good now with memories of a bad then?
And since it is now, let’s now look at Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week. I’ve already seen them but I’ll pretend I haven’t and chuckle right along with you…
For some reason, I never had one of those toys when I was a kid so I had to grow up without advice from the spirit world.
Hey, it beats the hip replacement macaroni.
Are you sure you want to drive around with a dog urinal in your trunk?
Shouldn’t that be “winglegume”?
I can’t help wondering what his shoe tattoo looks like when he straightens his arm.
You’d need eyes the size of chocolate chip cookies to be an undercover agent in that place.
This brings us to the end of our cartoon Ouroboros today. Thanks for sticking around until we swallowed our own tail. If you enjoy our work and that we offer it for free, without paywalls or ads, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. We’ll appreciate it with vigor!
Until next time, walk softly but carry a big shoulder bag. You never know when you might need it.
BIZARRO SHOP Fun and cheap!
… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels