Sidekicks
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.
Saludos, Jazz Pickles. I’m happy you’re here. Today’s two-panel comic (above) plays with the dual concepts of role reversal and sidekicks.
Sidekicks give heroes more depth and make stories better. When I think of stories, my mind goes to something everyone engages in as children, a game with no rules commonly called “make-believe.” We make up stories about heroes, villains, battles, lovers, animals, magic, you name it. Psychologists agree that this is a necessary part of childhood development, and helps us to deal with the world, process fears, and practice being human.
Other species do this too. If you watch a litter of puppies or kittens playing, they mostly play at fighting and killing each other, but nobody gets hurt. It’s classic make-believe.
We don’t think about it, but this kind of “play-acting” isn’t exclusive to the young. We do it throughout our lives with fiction. Movies, TV series, books, songs, stories of any kind, and even sporting events are all about make-believe. We pretend we are in the story, in the characters’ shoes, solving mysteries, swinging the hero’s sword, or riding their dragon. Sporting events are a kind of fictional war in which it is of utmost importance that our side emerges victorious, but in the end, it is fiction. We know there are no real-world benefits or consequences to a game. (Unless you happen to live in a city in which people confuse fiction for reality and riot when they lose.)
Embracing fiction of any kind is a way of practicing life. We can confront challenges and fears and plan our response. We can feel deep emotions with the knowledge that there will be no lasting sadness.
We do it privately, too. How many times have you imagined what you would do if you were confronted by an attacker? If I had a nickel for every time I envisioned myself escaping or defeating an assailant, I’d be able to afford a full-time bodyguard with an 8th-degree black belt. (A character like that would make a great sidekick!)
And sidekicks are common because we are social animals; we’re used to having someone to bounce things off of. If a cat wrote a story, they probably wouldn’t include a sidekick, unless they were just going to play with it for a while and then kill it.
A sidekick also gives a story more depth. The hero has all kinds of obstacles to overcome, villains to defeat, and damsels to rescue and fall in love with. Stories need at least a little humor, and being funny or ridiculous might make the hero seem less heroic. Sidekicks have plenty of time for the ancillary activities of an adventure, and less delicate egos when they do something laughable.
Of the characters in my cartoon above, Tonto makes a much better sidekick than Toto because he can speak. The Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, and the Scarecrow were much more useful sidekicks for Dorothy than Toto was, but the above joke wouldn’t have worked with them. (Even though cramming that trio together onto a single horse would have been fun!)
It might also be fun to do a comic about Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road with the band called Toto, but that’s a cartoon for another day.
Last night, I fell and messed up my wrist. I don’t know if it is fractured or sprained, but I can’t use it this morning for much more than slow, gentle typing. It occurred to me that my left hand is my right hand’s sidekick. I use the right to do the heroic stuff: art, brushing my teeth, navigating the trackpad on my laptop, pouring coffee. My left hand provides comic relief by not being half as good at anything as the other hand is.
I’m concerned I will lack depth and humor until my sidekick recovers.
***
Let’s find out now if Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week had any sidekicks…
Right off the bat, we can see that the younger guy is the sidekick, and can presume that if the dominoes begin to tumble, they’ll fall on him.
Are you open to shaving the full-body beard?
I think they have little blue pills for that now. (If you’re confused by this joke, search “the frog prince.”)
Nothing says “hire me” like a slacker in a T-shirt.
Fave comment of the week: “Crappuccino”
Because cannons are hard to wave in the air.
That signals the crescendo of our Comedy Concerto for Seven Chuckles. Thanks for not pelting the stage with tomatoes. If you like that we do this for free each week, please consider helping us keep it this way via the links below. We’ll love you like a hurricane.
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