Internists
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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Hiya, J Pickles. Welcome to this thing.
If you’ve never been inside the Statue of Liberty, you may not know that she is entirely anatomically correct inside, with all of her organs fashioned out of sheets of copper just like her exterior shell.
The entrance is inside the enormous stone pedestal at the back of the gift shop, and you climb a set of stairs from there up to the inside of her floor-length skirt. Once inside the actual statue structure, a spiral staircase begins next to her right foot and continues up past the fibula, then the femur, and through the pelvis. The stairs then jog around the uterus and intestines and snake their way up through the abdomen and into the thorax, passing the heart and lungs.
When I climbed it in the early 1990s, the staircase was very narrow, only wide enough for a single, average-sized person. (I suspect they’ve widened them in recent years to accommodate the new and improved, 25%-extra-sized Americans of today.) There was another identical stairway spiraling alongside it like a double helix, for people heading down from the crown.
Both sets of stairs become even more narrow as they pass through the neck, circling her esophagus. As you pass through the throat area and look into the mouth, you may notice that her teeth are not fashioned from copper but from something that looks very much like ivory—which the original ones were—but they were replaced by bakelite in the 1930s.
Her French sculptor Bartholdi originally included a brain, but it was lost at sea during her trip across the Atlantic when the crate carrying it was swept overboard in a storm. Rather than leaving her with an empty head, an observation deck about the size of a small city bus curved into a crescent was added inside the crown.
Entry to the statue’s interior was closed in 2002 after the events of 9/11 but reopened in 2009. It’s a grueling climb to the top, but I highly recommend it.
One other fact: almost everything I’ve said above is untrue. Almost.
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Let’s see if we can spot any falsehoods in Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week…
He who has never traded livestock for recreational drugs cast the first stone.
I have D.R.S.—Delayed Retort Syndrome. I can never think of the perfect thing to say until much too late.
I just wish it wasn’t make you sound like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
Therapy isn’t right for all couples. Some should take their grievances to a paintball park.
They conducted a test run on that egg dude who sits on a wall, and it went pretty well.
When you wear camo-print clothing, it’s always best to remind people that you are not a head floating around without a body.
That concludes this week’s cartoon Olympics. Thanks for cheering us on despite the lack of TV coverage. If you enjoy our antics and that this site doesn’t assail you with ads and clickbait, please consider helping us keep it this way via the links below. Thanks for stopping by!
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