I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, a short essay, and then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.

And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.

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On Friday, I finally launched my subscription newsletter, The Naked Cartoonist, and the above cartoon (submitted six weeks ago) coincidentally turned out to be completely appropriate. 

Whether graphic art, writing, music, comedy, or a one-man show about your heart-wrenching childhood performed in mime, offering one’s creative efforts to the public is always scary. By “scary,” I mean “terrifying.” This kind of terror could be called a fear of heights. 

Staying inconspicuously low to the ground and keeping your innards to yourself feels like a safer place to be, for sure. But it also offers few opportunities for the kind of gratification you can get from learning that your creation has moved someone or made them laugh.

I believe that all humans are creative—it’s our species’ superpower. People who think they are not creative are mistaken and have likely given up trying because they believe they are not talented. But don’t let that stop you. Even if you think you’re overflowing with talent, it always feels like a risk to share your creations with others. Sharing something we’ve created is like exposing your inner thoughts and psychological landscape, and we naturally fear it opens us up to rejection.

But the truth is, no matter what you bring into the world, innumerable people will see themselves in it and relate to it positively. That’s true whether you ever hear from them or not.

I’ve loved writing since I was a teen but it has taken me decades to find confidence in it. I wrote songs for my band back in my twenties, and though the lyrics were meaningful to me, nobody in the dive bars we played could understand a word at the volume with which we performed them.

Over time, my creative confidence grew incrementally (but my income from music did not!) so I moved from there to cartooning. Writing one-liners for cartoons was scary, but people liked them well enough that it slowly gave me the confidence to try more, so I started a weekly blog post. In the early posts, I added a paragraph or two about that week’s cartoons, but over the years, those grew into little essays of sorts about all kinds of stuff; whatever detritus that was floating through my mind at the time. Some of my readers said they enjoyed those so I gained a little more confidence. Eventually, I was writing longer articles about stuff that had nothing to do with my cartoons. Many seemed completely out of place in a cartoon blog post.

More recently, as my income from the crumbling newspaper industry plummeted, I needed to find a new income stream. Many people confuse millionaire cartoonists like Jim Davis of Garfield with cult-following thousandaires like me. To give you an idea of the difference, Bizarro was syndicated for 12 years before I could afford to quit my day job as a commercial illustrator and still keep my family living indoors and eating daily. I did okay but my kids went to public schools and a state university, and none of my cars were worth stealing.

I’ve been asking readers for donations for a few years now and have deeply appreciated your generosity. But rather than keep asking for money for content you could otherwise get online for free, I thought I might feel better about offering a service for a few bucks a month. That, and the fact that I love writing were the impetus for my subscription newsletter. 

I called it The Naked Cartoonist because offering my writing to the public has always felt like public speaking with no pants. Still, the process of sharing creative efforts has been so gratifying for so many years, that I am now compelled to do it and probably couldn’t stop if I tried. 

Last Sunday was Bizarro’s 39th anniversary, and after so many years of a creative life, I’ve come to believe that creativity is how our subconscious (and unconscious, in a Jungian sense) communicates with us. In my view, these are messages from other dimensions and there is an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom to be gained if we learn how to listen. We are meant to benefit from these inspirations, and if we share them, others benefit, too. 

I encourage you to follow your creative inspirations and fearlessly share them with the world in large or small ways. You may surprise yourself. And I hope you’ll give my new endeavor a try and find some value in it. (For a couple of samples of my newsletter writing, see my introduction post.)

Now let’s see what creative efforts my partner Wayno has shared in this week’s Bizarro cartoons…

I hope Tonto is not represented in this image.

Kids these days go from wheeled to wild way too fast.

Sadly, their volume created an avalanche and neither were seen again.

This one really shows off Wayno’s sneaky way of hiding Secret Symbols.

The Ramen Empire continues to conquer new territory yearly.

Why must we always go straight to “possessed?” Is it possible he just has a daring fashion sense?

Thus concludes this week’s comic coup. Thanks for sticking around to help us extinguish all opposition. If you like what we do here and that we do it for free, please help us keep it that way via one or more of the links below, or by subscribing to The Naked Cartoonist. I’ll be so grateful I’ll throw on a robe before I answer the door.

Until next time, keep your rabid ape away from the apes you love.

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My wife, Olive Oyl’s art, writing, and photography