Sibling Quibbling
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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Welcome to this thing, Jazz Pickles. I hope you’re feeling crispy and tart today.
The Sunday cartoon above is about sibling rivalry, albeit among mythological characters. I once read that even though it can be brutal, it is completely natural. While our parents are our lifeline, our siblings are the opposite—competitors for resources. If there’s not enough food for the whole family, the more selfish or aggressive offspring eats while the other goes hungry or gets left in the forest.
I’m a big believer in genetic programming. Studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised by different families go a long way to proving that in fascinating ways.
Anyone who has spawned and raised more than one kid knows they can be very different from day one; same parents, same environment, but very different abilities and personalities. And while that genetic foundation may be more or less set in stone, our environment and experiences act on it in different ways. I think our personalities are a combo of nature and nurture with a heavy emphasis on nature, as opposed to completely one or the other. In the case of the two humans I raised, they are alike in some ways and very different in others, as all siblings tend to be.
But one of them recently threw me a curveball by coming out of a closet I did not even know existed. Sure, if your kid says, “By the way, I’m gay,” it’s a closet you’ve heard of and you know what that means. I wasn’t sure what my kid was telling me, so it required some clarification.
I wrote about our conversation in the most recent article for my subscription newsletter The Naked Cartoonist. I got a lot of very appreciative comments from people and a few requests to post the article more widely, so I’ve put it here on my Bizarro blog, free for anyone. It’s titled, “A Conversation with my ‘They’,” and I welcome your comments and encourage you to forward the link to anyone you think might enjoy it.
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And now I encourage you to enjoy this week’s Bizarro cartoons from my brother by choice, not birth, Wayno.
Who couldn’t use a parallelogran these days?
Now he needs only to choose which self.
There is no crime that cannot be solved with enough pushpins and yarn.
Crap. I worry that this describes me for the better part of the last thirty years. (Except for the dad jeans.)
Ring toss will bring the animal out in people, for sure.
I do love me some snow pie with maple syrup!
Those snowfolk signal the end of our cryogenic comedy cavalcade this week. If you enjoy our comics and that we bring them to you for free, we hope you’ll consider helping us keep it that way via the links below. We appreciate your readership and always speak kindly of you to others.
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