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 the above comic’s Secret Symbols.

Happy hello, Jazz Pickles! Thanks for pausing here.

If you’re under a certain age, you may not fully “get” my Sunday cartoon above. But it’s my impression that most of you blog readers are Baby Boomers, like me, so you shouldn’t have any trouble.

I attempted to depict a middle-aged guy who is stuck in the ‘70s, still living with his parents and employing the vernacular and fashions of that era. 

Embarrassing as it may be now, we used to call people “groovy,” “hip,” and “chicks” back then. I still do, but not because I’m stuck in time still trying to pull off a “shag” haircut as my hair thins, but because I’m an erudite urbanite who appreciates irony. (Judging by that sentence [and this one] I’m also an arrogant vocabulary exhibitionist.)

With that shameless display behind us, I’d like to share an excerpt from my most recent story in my creative writing project The Naked Cartoonist. 

It’s a true story of my first grown-up job and what it taught me about corporate culture’s relationship to honesty and fairness. It’s called “Catch Him if You Can” (an intentional reference to the film of a similar name) for reasons that become obvious upon reading.

When I was 22, without experience or education in the field, I was hired as a designer of high-fashion ads for a luxury department store. I was a stupid kid from a small town with all the savvy and maturity of Gomer Pyle, working with big-city creative types. Did I sink or swim?

It started like this: 

“It was a dream job: I was making several times the minimum wage; my boss was super cool; I was getting paid to be creative; and I got to be on photo shoots with famous models I’d seen on the covers of magazines. I occasionally even got a glimpse of them in their underwear as they changed outfits. What more could an aspiring 22-year-old artist ask for?”

But it became this:

“Enraged, I stormed into the Vice President’s office (he was a friendly sort with an open-door policy that allowed for storming) and told him the whole story. My every word was festooned with righteous indignation and it felt good to let the dam burst. I told him I was ready to walk if I had to work with that fraud for another day!”

What happened in between those two quotes is amusing. What happened after, was a lesson in human nature that we all learn one way or another. The story also includes a handful of fun cartoons about corporate life. 

If you’d like to give it a try, it’s five bucks a month and you can cancel at any time, which a very small handful of folks did a couple of weeks ago after I promoted my involvement in a fundraiser for Harris/Walz. Oh well.

Let’s now putter over to Bizarro Studios North and see if we can glimpse Wayno in his underwear as he files another week of Bizarro cartoons into the annals of human history…

Readers who were unfamiliar with the Medusa myth were confused about this one. So were readers who were too stoned.

Wayno admits he missed the Secret Symbol count on this one. It should be 6. One of them was so hard to spot that he, our editor, and I all missed it.

He sings this song evey 13 or 17 years.

Trigger warning: If you are coulrophobic, do not read this cartoon. (I hope it isn’t too late.)

Sock puppets were the original artificial intelligence.

But…didn’t you come here for back issues?

Thanks for your picklish attention. If you enjoy that we’re still doing this for free even after the bottom dropped out of the newspaper industry, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. We promise to smile and think well of you often.

The Naked Cartoonist…My weekly subscription newsletter of humorous creative writing, photos, art, & more.

… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!

WAYNO’S TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!

My graphic novel PEYOTE COWBOY

…Signed, numbered, limited-edition prints and original Bizarro panels  

COMICS KINGDOM SHOP (now with Bizarro products!)

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