How Mad?
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, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for stopping by on this exciting day.
I’ll use this week’s post to proudly announce my wife’s new website: Christy Higgins Art & Writing. Until now, she’s been known to readers of this blog as “Olive Oyl,” and as the inspiration behind the O2 in my list of Secret Symbols. Now that she is “coming out of the closet” as an artist, you can get to know the mujer behind the myth.
The chief connection Christy and I have always had is that we are both seekers; people who are eternally searching for higher truths and deeper meanings. In our early years, we usually didn’t agree on what those truths and meanings were, but we kept marching down that road independently and as a couple.
A major milestone along our shared journey was when she started doing art, only a few years ago. She’d always had a strong interest in mythology, depth psychology, and psychospiritual matters in general, and had studied those topics relentlessly, but her creative impulses had been quashed by a series of life’s traumas. Even allowing herself to explore the arts was an enormous challenge. Just getting past that initial hurdle was huge, and she did it with flying colors.
I’ll be honest, when she started doing art, I was terrified. What if she created images that forced me to either lie or tell her a truth that might hurt her feelings? I knew she had terrific taste in clothes and interior design, but what kind of artist would she be? I’m a terrible liar so I was quaking in my boots.
I’m happy to announce my fears were unwarranted. Even in her earliest attempts, she took off like a rocket, creating images that were completely unexpected—even to her—and compositionally far superior to what one normally gets from a novice. I’ve watched her grow and improve tremendously over the past few years, but as good as I (and our friends) thought her work was, she was still reticent to share it with the public.
Reticent, is perhaps too mild. “Terrified” was more like it. So building this website and announcing it to the public is yet another huge hurdle and I’m thrilled that she’s made the leap. Her blog includes galleries of her mixed-media collage art and her photography. The original art of her collages is for sale, and prints will be available of those, as well as her photography.
Her site also has a blog she’s calling, The Seekers Notebook. In her initial post, she says she intends to use it “to bring together my interests in identity, art-making, and journaling through the lens of myth and depth psychology. This is where I’ll be attempting to weave my passion for art, self-exploration, and spiritual inquiry into a cohesive narrative; with art and writing.”
I invite you to check out her site and read her first blog post here.
Time now to bring together our interests in comedy, art, and Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week…
The way he holds the cigarette is a dead giveaway.
Those horn warmers almost make me wish I had horns.
Might be Hammer Time, amigo.
There was a time when I thought getting psychos off of street corners was a good thing but now many of them have million-dollar media empires.
Watch out for that seltzer bottle probe.
Our monument to the unknown stand-up marks the end of this week’s comic cattle drive. Thanks for sticking around until we could get the cattle out of the car. If you enjoy what we’re doing and that we don’t subject you to ads and other unwanted Internet crap, please consider helping us keep the free cartoons coming via one or more of the links below. We’ll thank you and think of you often.
Until next time, BE somewhere all week.
BIZARRO SHOP Fun and cheap!
… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels
King Features Subscription + archive access
COMICS KINGDOM SHOP (now with Bizarro products!)