Curse of Abundance
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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Hello again, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for tickling our URL.
We all hope for abundance, but too much of a good thing can be a curse.
It’s good to be tall, but once you exceed 8 feet, you’ve got a chronic backache from stooping through doorways and you can’t drive a car without an open sunroof. It’s good to have a full, thick head of hair, but if it carpeted every inch of your head from your shirt collar up, it could invite unsavory nicknames.
We all enjoy our limbs, but two arms and a couple of legs are plenty. Having an extra set of arms might be handy, but then you’d have six limbs, and that’s too Kafkaesque for most people’s comfort. Too much of a good thing becomes a curse.
Our amazing fellow earthlings in the arachnid family are cursed with eight limbs. Cursed, because though lots of folks are creeped out by six-legged creatures (insects) almost everyone is needlessly terrified of spiders.
I would not want to take my chances as a spider, even if it meant I could shoot a thin thread of silk that is stronger than steel (true!) out of my backside. If you don’t stay completely hidden, some assjacket with half as many limbs as you is going to stomp on you or vacuum you up into a dark, dusty dungeon to die.
I confess I’ve thoughtlessly murdered countless spiders out of fear and revulsion. I used to be terrified of them but now I’m not, thanks to my buddy (and Bizarro reader) Rick Vetter.
Some years ago, when I lived in L.A., I made friends with an arachnologist and he schooled me. Professor Rick explained that of the tens of thousands of known species of spiders, (excluding ticks & scorpions, different types of arachnids) though many are venomous, all but a tiny handful are not dangerous to humans. Of the very few potentially deadly species, only two are found in the US: the black widow and the brown recluse. Canada has half as many with only the widow.
There are NO dangerous spiders in Europe or the UK, if you don’t count politicians.
(CORRECTION: Bizarro reader “Val” alerted me to a species called the Mediterranean Black Widow indigenous to that area and eastward through Asia.)
The vast majority of spiders the world over cannot bite or injure a human in any way, and none of them seek to unless threatened. We are as unappetizing to them as they are to us.
In fact, though they will do everything in their eight-legged power to avoid us, virtually every spider we encounter in our homes is likely making it safer for us by eating pests that can bite or contaminate us: flies, mosquitos, fleas, bedbugs, etc.
As an expert, Rick is sometimes called to testify in court. Weird, right? What kind of crimes do spiders get caught up in?
It’s not crimes, of course, it’s people suing doctors over the alleged misdiagnosis of a bite. I can’t imagine suing a doctor over a spider bite but if it can be done, Americans will find a way. Apparently, a lot more people think they’ve been bitten by brown recluse spiders than actually have been. Rick told me that the overwhelming majority of such cases are actually infected insect bites and had nothing to do with the much-maligned spider. (Experts can read the bite marks and infection patterns or something, and the brown recluse bite has a distinct signature.)
Rick also said that catching spiders and putting them outside is either pointless or cruel; there are inside spiders and outside spiders, and they can’t switch. You can kick them out, but they’ll move right back in like a kid with a useless college degree, or die on the mean streets like a character from a Scorcese film.
(CORRECTION: I asked Rick Vetter to read this post and correct any errors. Disappointingly, he said he didn’t say there were indoor and outdoor spiders. Evolutionarily, all spiders developed outdoors, so it must be possible. Although, if a spider has lived indoors for an extended period of time, its diet and weather acclimation would be completely tuned to indoors, and putting them outside could be fatal. I suppose I should delete that paragraph, but the whole “useless college degree” and “character from a Scorcese film” thing is the best line in this post so I can’t bring myself to do it!)
The moral of this week’s cartoon is simple: be kind to Spider-men inside or outside. Most just want to eat your enemies.
One final bit of arachnid trivia: The original Spider-man comics character shot webs out of his ass, like a real spider.* The Comics Code Authority shut that butt-party down, so they had to move his spinnerets to his wrists. Probably not a bad choice.
(*This is what we humorists call a lie in search of a chuckle.)
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Let’s find out now what webs my partner Wayno has been spinning in this week’s Bizarro cartoons…
If he strums while he whines he might accidentally write a hit song.
Aliens treat every problem with a visit to an analyst.
Brothers sometimes take different paths.
Just throw it onto the floor beneath the table, please.
For reals: In high school in 1973, I sometimes wore overalls with no shirt and I had an afro the size of a full-grown sheep.
I just hope he takes that shirt with him.
That’s the last of this week’s batch of cartoon cookies, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around till they cool.
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