Reaction Time
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 whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Secret Symbols in the Sunday comic, above.——————————————————
Welcome to this post, Jazz Pickles. I have a few things to cover today, not all of which are funny or pleasant. Let’s take the Sunday cartoon above first.
When I was in high school in the late 1900s, all of the cool kids watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus on Sunday nights on PBS. I recall a skit in which John Cleese is teaching a karate class how to defend oneself against an attacker armed with a banana. The students object and want him to teach them how to defend against a knife or a pointy stick but he angrily informs them they are not yet ready. I thought it was funny.
Decades later, when I lived in NYC, I was lucky enough to be in the audience of a tiny club when a young comedian performed an original routine in which he portrayed the teacher of a self-defense class. I remember no specifics about the routine other than I thought it was brilliant and it made me laugh a lot. I chatted up the comedian afterward and he informed me that the routine had been part of his audition for Saturday Night Live and that he’d just been hired as a writer for the show. His name was Fred Armisen.
In a sense, my cartoon above is a graphic representation of how to defend oneself against an attacker armed with a rubber hammer. I can’t say that either of the aforementioned comedy skits “gave” me the idea for this cartoon, but when it came to me, I thought of them both, so I’ll claim them as subconscious inspiration. There is sometimes a thin line between inspiration and plagiarism, but our inner voice tells us when we’ve crossed it.
That brings us to the unpleasant part. I crossed that line once in the late 90s and it has haunted me ever since. My inner voice has grumbled about it from time to time and lately, it seems to be telling me to confess it publicly and restore my integrity. I’ve learned to follow that voice, so, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”
The story is that I was touring my one-man comedy show acting as manager, booking agent, roadie, propmaster, and performer while also writing and drawing seven cartoons a week for my Bizarro deadlines. I was performing in a different city almost every night and stretching myself terribly thin. Looking back, I don’t know how I had the energy.
None of that is an excuse for what came next, it’s just background. During that period, in a fog of inexplicably poor judgment, I drew and submitted two cartoons that I’d seen on a greeting card website months before. I can’t remember the name of the artist who wrote them, but I took the ideas, changed them only slightly, and published them as my own. A few weeks later, when the cartoons appeared in newspapers, the artist emailed me with a big WTF?!
I was horrified. I felt like such a piece of shit. I apologized profusely and gave him some story about not remembering where the ideas came from and how I’d mistaken them for my own. I even tried to believe that myself, but I knew that wasn’t true. I lied to him to save face because I was humiliated. I don’t think he believed me but he let it drop.
I honestly don’t remember what I was thinking. Just as Scott Adams knows the syndicated cartoon business well enough to know that if he came out as a racist he’d lose most of his clients, I knew that if I published a stolen gag, someone would notice and call me on it. It was stupid, lazy, dishonest, and inexplicable. I was sorry then and I’m still sorry twenty-something years later. It’s not who I want to be.
I often delude myself into thinking I’m better than I am but the truth is I’m a work in progress with a long way to go. I’ll never plagiarize anyone again because it feels awful for a long time, but I’ll make other mistakes and I look forward to telling you all about them.
On a lighter note, there are a few fun background jokes in the Sunday comic above, featured below at a more legible size.
To shake off that sleazy story about my indiscretions, let’s view some of Wayno’s guaranteed original Bizarro cartoons from the week…
I’m a big fan of corvids and wish I could be one of those rare people who makes friends with one. I do not feel the same way about adolescent poets, however.
The last time I had an office job, I could barely summon up the energy to lick a stamp.
Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and that perfectly describes what Etch-A-Sketch was for me when I was a kid.
“A man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client” is usually attributed to Abraham Lincoln but the Internet says he was not the first to say it. Just a bit of triviata.*
*See next cartoon
A bit of trivia: “triviata” is not a word in any language. (Except Italian, in which it means “misguided,” which is not at all the sense we’re using it here so disregard that information.)
Cats are like Vikings; they terrify, torture, and murder but we idolize them. Please don’t tell my cat I wrote that.
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