Drawing Conclusions
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday Bizarro comic above is mine, as are the comments below. The past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics that follow were 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.
Parts of this week’s Sunday cartoon are not very well drawn, but that’s the point.
Have you ever felt “poorly drawn?” I confess that I have. I’ve wished I were taller, less bald, and had lips that were visible from more than six inches away.
Almost all of us have things about our appearance that we would change, and many spend craploads of money on surgery to do just that. But psychologists will warn that it doesn’t always work. Plastic surgery may not improve our self-esteem as much as we hope it will, nor change the way others see us. Just like our mothers told us, in the end, it’s who we are inside that creates our self-image and what others think of us.
In keeping with the ancient concept of “as above, so below,” this relates to cartoons, too.
As a kid with a gift for drawing, I became obsessed with realism. I thought the whole point of art was to draw/paint/sculpt realistically, and I brought that sensibility to my cartoon career. What I’d always wanted to be was a painter of fine art, but cartooning turned out to be the path that allowed me to support myself and my family. Some of my early work reflected that and was absurdly detailed and realistic for a newspaper cartoon. One could argue that it often still is, and that’s okay. It just isn’t essential.
A Sunday panel from 1996 with one of my first cameo appearances. Trompe l’oeil is something I’ve dabbled with in my fine art and still really love. I think I may redo this panel for publication again soon.
I’m ashamed to admit that in the early years of my career, I regularly ridiculed cartoon features I deemed poorly drawn, usually out of jealousy that they were more popular than Bizarro.
It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood and my sense of aesthetics matured that I realized the value of non-realistic and naive art and the relative unimportance of expert draftsmanship. As with our physical appearance versus our character, the look of a cartoon isn’t as important as the content; if it makes you laugh or think, it doesn’t matter how well it is drawn. And the reverse is also true; if a cartoon is as boring as watching a chess match in slow motion, it doesn’t matter how well it is drawn.
That realization hasn’t changed my affinity for good hand skills and aesthetics, but it has changed my attitude toward comics that are more crudely or simply drawn. I now judge cartoons by how much I get from reading them, more than how much I like the art.
And to reverse the previous phrase: as below, so above. People of good character make better friends, coworkers, and citizens than those who are good-looking but empty inside.
That’s just my two cents’ worth on a Sunday morning, but I’m just a short, bald guy with thin lips, so what do I know?
For a sample of excellence in both categories, let’s turn now to Wayno’s good-looking and chuckle-worthy Bizarro cartoons from the week…
Visits from repairmen are far too frequently grim. As the saying goes, “Shit happens, and then you have buy a new dishwasher.”
Cats were the first to discover the concept of reincarnation.
When my kids were barfing infants, I wore tie-dyed T-shirts for this same reason.
Giving Bigfoot a pedicure seems like one of those creative punishments in Hell. Being a vampire’s dental hygienist might be another.
A Magic Eightball might be a way to get through those faster.
I think this happened in Denver.
That’s all the Easter eggs we’ve got for you this week, Jazz Pickles. We hope you’re enjoying this holiday weekend. If you’re feeling grateful for our weekly content and that we don’t assail you with ads, please consider helping us keep it that way via one or more of the links below. We appreciate your support.
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