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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Nearly everyone has seen the famous image that I’ve satirized above. It is one of the most recognizable and parodied illustrations in the Western world. (I don’t know if it is as well-known in Asia.) The original illustration was created in 1965 by Rudolph Zallinger for the Early Man volume of the famous Time-Life Books series. It is titled “The Road to Homo Sapiens,” and is, of course, meant to show the progress of evolution from monkeys to humans.

But is “progress” the right word?

Sure, we humans are pretty damn smart and have created a lot of wonderful and terrible things, but if our evolution ultimately leads us to cause our own extinction, can we still call that progress?

Sharks have been around for over 100 million years, alligators for 37 million, and as yet, neither species has caused their own extinction or that of any other species. Being such lazy and underachieving species is likely why they mostly hide underwater in shame.

But we humans are much more ambitious, having raced to the brink of causing our own demise in only 300,000 years. Well done, us! 

But wait! Can we not also use our super brains to back away from the cliff, and invent ways to heal the damage we’ve caused? It would appear that we don’t have much time! 

But that’s okay because we humans tend to do approximately jack-shit unless we have a hard deadline. We’ve known we were heading full-speed into a wall for fifty years or more, but half a century is not the kind of deadline we like. We’re more likely to stop taking selfies, put down our phones, and get off our asses when the deadline is close enough to smell death on its breath. And here we are!

Do we still have time to SAVE THE WORLD? We’re about to find out. In the meantime, I’m going to be asking sharks and alligators what their secret is to not killing themselves in the evolutionary blink of an eye. Maybe they can help. At the very least, perhaps they’ll start eating a lot more humans and slow down the whole process.

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A SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY!

Wayno and I just celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of our calamitous cartoon collaboration. We had a little online video chat about how we met and started working with each other and wondered if any of you might be interested in watching it. You can be a fly on the wall and do just that here.

And here’s our first collaboration, from April of 2009; Wayno’s idea, my art. I still think this is an excellent gag!

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Now let’s race to the present and have a look-see at Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week!

I’m wondering what the sign in the background says: “Customer service?” “Comb advice?” Something else? Submit your suggestions in the comments section below.

Before you ask, yes, the upside-down eagle on the certificate counts.

I could use this jelly. I can never understand what my butter is talking about.

No math necessary. I’ve been battling cooties for years but can never get completely rid of them.

For readers not familiar with Trader Joe’s, it’s a very popular chain of boutique grocery stores that’s famous for its casual atmosphere. Employees dress more like surfers than the average grocery store worker.

Lately, I’ve been including in these posts a little pitch about my creative writing project, The Naked Cartoonist. Today I’ll post the intro video I made for this week’s story, “I Sleep Like a Dog.”

For just $5, you can read all the stories I’ve posted so far, plus the videos, photos, art, and other stuff I toss in. If you don’t enjoy it, you can cancel at any time and we’ll still be friends. I promise not to tweet threats to you and your family members.

If you like what we do and that we don’t plague you with ads and clickbait, please consider helping us keep it that way via one or more of the links below. We will love you for it!

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