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.

As a wee lad, I was captivated by the black and white Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller. Everything about them was exotic: the location, the lifestyle, and the wide variety of animals he would come across (and often have to fight with to the death) just going about his daily routine. He lived the life of the ruler over a cageless zoo. 

It was the first of the Weissmuller films that introduced me to the legend of an “elephant’s graveyard,” a secret place where elephants supposedly went to die. If greedy fortune-seekers could find it, they could go home with a fortune in ivory.

But Tarzan was in league with the elephants, who operated as his personal Uber service. If he got wind of their plans, he’d put a stop to their desecration of hallowed ground, and they’d likely end up in a crocodile’s alimentary canal or converted into skeletons in mere seconds by piranhas. 

It was the first Tarzan movie that inspired my Snowman’s Graveyard cartoon above. I cast a couple of my nieces as the discoverers of the magical place. They’re both adults now and neither is a greedy fortune thief—that I know of. 

Even if they were, in this scenario, they’d go home with little more than a sack of rotting winter clothing and hats. It is unlikely that Tarzan would care enough to feed them to crocodiles.

As I think about those movies now, it occurs to me that the Jane character was the first woman the Weissmuller version of Tarzan ever met. He was raised by apes, lived alone well into adulthood, and his best friend was a chimp. Despite living on an inhabited continent, he never came across humans (other than a tribe of angry pygmies who were always trying to kill him) until British explorers began arriving. They happened to bring Jane, and Tarzan fell for her faster than the plane that had killed his parents when he was an infant a few decades earlier.

How fortunate that the only suitable mate he’d ever met was as attractive as movie star Maureen O’Sullivan! 

But wait. With no others to compare her to, he would have acquired no imprinting on females of his species and hence, no likely preferences. She could have looked like Patton Oswalt and he’d have probably had the hots for her. In fact, if Patton Oswalt himself had been the first human he’d ever come across, he likely would have fallen in love with him, too. 

Though I have a number of friends who might welcome being romantically pursued by Tarzan, I don’t think I’d care to find myself in the wild trying to escape a horny Olympic-level athlete wearing a homemade loincloth. While I’m scrambling through the undergrowth of a dense jungle, tripping over roots and trying to avoid lions, big snakes, and quicksand, he’s speeding through the treetops above me swinging from vines. It would be like being chased through an Ikea store by a weaponized drone. I wouldn’t stand a chance.

In reality, such a human might have imprinted on gorillas, so Maureen O’Sullivan would have been quite the opposite of what he looked for in a mate. Hollywood of the 1930s decided that would not be the case. Who are we to judge? 

While doing a little research for this post, I discovered that Johnny Weissmuller retired in Mexico. Since all of my loincloths are store-bought, retiring in Mexico and finding Maureen O’Sullivan attractive may be the only two things Tarzan and I have in common.

Let’s find out if Wayno has anything to say about his similarities to Tarzan in his Bizarro cartoons from the week…

The chalice isn’t my style but I dig the cutlery.

Plenty of people would spend good money for that treatment.

He may have missed a spot when shaving his chest.

He’ll soon be looking for the Ghost of Christmas Bismol.

My wife and I need the Spanish version of this horn.

The altitude of his waistband is a dead giveaway.

That signals the end of our comedy expedition, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for enduring the heat and mosquitoes. If you appreciate that our site is free, please consider helping us keep it that way via the portals below. In gratitude, I’ll teach my dogs to howl your name at the moon.

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