Seuss Suite
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.——————————————————
The Sunday cartoon above is the third kids’ poem-cum-comic. I’ve mentioned in previous posts how a bunch of weird little poems began coming to me back in the late 90s and how I wrote them down intending to illustrate them for a book. I never got around to that but I made comics out of a few.
This one is about Dr. Seuss books, which had a tremendous influence on me as a kid. They were my favorite children’s books by far. I found the art and the rhyming stories endlessly fun and fascinating.
You may recall that a couple of years ago there was a big controversy over Dr. Seuss's books and the publisher retired six titles as a result. This was the result of accusations that some of his work contained racially insensitive images or stereotypes. I won’t weigh in on that but I encourage you to read a little online about it and decide for yourself. I only bring this up to say that this cartoon has nothing to do with any of that. I wrote the poem in 1999-or-so and the controversy was nearly 100 years later in 2021.
Here are two more of the poems from that era, neither of which are going to be cartoons.
Cat Present
Look what the cat brought in from outside.
It’s usually shy, it usually hides.
It’s usually cute and furry and sweet.
Is it a squirrel, or a bird, or some old baboon feet?
Lost Dog
Where, oh where has my little dog gone?
Could it be he left for Japan?
I heard someone saw him at the airport in Bonne.
He was dressed like a samurai man.
I guess it makes sense, he always liked sushi—
he likes his food raw and not cooked.
Or maybe he wants to be like John Belushi,
On old SNL he was hooked.
Wherever he’s gone, I hope that he’s happy
and has lots of money for food.
And I hope where he is it is not very cold,
when he left here I think he was nude.
And here’s one last one that I published in 2016.
Thanks for reading my childish nonsense. Time now to see what childish nonsense Wayno has left in our path as we make our way to the bottom of this page:
It’s pretty hard to find a 15-gallon hat.
The way Wayno drew these rats reminds me of Big Daddy Roth’s Ratfink. I had tons of stickers and models of that character when I was a kid.
I was surprised this one didn’t get any flak from Puritans but so far, nothing.
A commentator on IG mentioned something about them hooking up.
They have a big arena where they feed X2Lrms to the Bzligm8s for sport.
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