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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Bienvenidos, Jazz Pickles. Gracias por visitarme.

If the Indian-themed cartoon above doesn’t immediately make sense, go read Moby Dick and then come back. (No need to finish the entire novel; just read until the cartoon clicks.)

The act (if not the art) of writing has become exponentially easier in my lifetime. I took a typing class in 9th grade and still contend it was the most valuable thing I learned in school. I have typed exponentially more often than I have solved for x.

The typewriters in my class in 1972 were not yet electric, so a person had to develop bulging muscles in their hands and fingers to slam those keys down hard enough to imprint the ink ribbon on the paper. There were around thirty students with typewriters in my class, and we were taught to type in rhythm with a recording, so when the entire class was slamming those keys down in unison, it sounded like the Nazis marching into Paris in 1940.

When you made a mistake, you had to slather white paint over the erroneous letter, blow on it until the paint dried, and then slam the correct key down in the same place. It was a living hell, but we didn’t know it because all we had to compare it to was carving letters into stone or waving a blanket over a campfire to create smoke signals.

Imagine trying to write a novel in smoke signals. To achieve a bestseller, you’d have to assemble the entire Cherokee Nation to watch as you exhausted yourself over a smoky fire for hours. Moby Dick would have required burning a small forest of wood to complete. I don’t even want to think about what you’d do about typos.

Soon after my introduction in the ‘70s to the typed word, the ever-racing heart of technology began to change things. Manual typewriters became electric, electric became computers, and computers became AI. 

When metal letter strikes were replaced with digital signals, newsrooms that once chattered like a hailstorm on a tin roof suddenly sounded like a herd of cats trotting across the floor of the apartment upstairs. 

Now, with the unpredictable magic of artificial intelligence, all you have to do is open an app on your cell phone, tap the little microphone icon at the bottom of the screen, and say, “Write a 600-page novel about a demented, authoritarian narcissist who is obsessed with a giant sea creature that he believes is trying to kill him,” and twenty seconds later, you’re the “author” of a bestseller. (Or a biography of DJT.) Thanks, technology! 

Before we move on: The title panel at the top of this post is a detail from a previous Bizarro cartoon. The caption was, “The Lone Ranger attempts to make Tonto jealous by getting a ‘real’ Indian sidekick.” It’s one of my all-time faves and, for the record, was created long before AI. 

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Let’s lumber on down the trail now and read Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week. Like Moby Dick, he was not created by AI, either. 

I think we’ve all had quite enough of this nonsense for one day. Thanks for enduring it with us. If you like what we do and appreciate that we don’t charge you for it, please consider helping us to continue via one or more of the links below. We’ll gratefully keep busting our knuckles to make you smile for years to come.

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