Heroes and Pigeons
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.
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Welcome, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for popping into our rest stop, and don’t forget to visit the gift shop before you leave.
The title image above, with war heroes sitting on a statue of a pigeon, is from a cartoon I published ages ago. I’ve always loved that image, and it’s the perfect companion for this week’s Sunday cartoon in which Tarzan was raised by pigeons in the park rather than apes in the jungle. (Let’s pause for a moment while we laugh heartily.)
Forgive my immodesty, but in what other cartoon do you get such advanced bottom-up perspective? (Probably several, but not many. I don’t follow cartoons very closely, so I’m only guessing.)
And yes, that’s me doing another cameo appearance in my own comic. What an egomaniac.
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Change of topic: EXCITING NEWS!
King Features has just added some fun new products to the Bizarro line of stuff-you-can-buy-and-wear! If you’re into our Secret Symbols thing, there’s a 7-out-of-13 chance that your favorite one is on one of our new shirts! (All the previous shirts and chotchkies are still available, too.)
The new shirts come in black, white, gray, and those other three colors above. (I’m calling them “swimming pool bottom,” “algae,” and “infected gums.”)
The embroidered-patch hats come in black or white, with only the UFO available at the moment, but if you cry and whine and refuse to eat your vegetables, we may add others.
Here’s a close-up of the five Secret Symbols available (plus the eyeball and arrow on each). For those not fluent in T-shirt language, they mean “I love pipe, - pie, - dynamite, - upside-down bird, and - alien.
Order yours now, before Wayno and I are kidnapped off the streets and sent to an immigrant concentration camp because our names end in a vowel!
And now, Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week with my stupid comments below each…
Most of our cartoon ideas come from the use of special cartoon hallucinogens, but this one came from a real-life experience of Wayno’s. He explains it in his blog post this week.
As I recall, the info my dad gave me on this topic was even less useful than the emojis above.
When I order a latte and they ask my preference of milk, I always answer, “mother’s.”
This guy reminds me of an email exchange I had this week. A MAGA fan wrote saying (among other things), “I do not approve of your content. Unsubscribe me.”
I did so, and replied with a simple, “Done.”
She replied to that email by saying, “I don’t want your emails anymore! Unsubscribe me!”
So I replied, “I did. That’s what ‘done’ meant. I’ll stop writing to you if you’ll stop writing to me.”
Empty thought balloons aren’t just in comics.
I saw a terrific documentary this week on Netflix about Ed Sullivan, of all people. I thought he was as dull as a soda cracker, but man, was I wrong! He was a fearless defender of civil rights and bucked the networks and the racist South when they were still lynching people down there. He’s my new hero.
The film is called Sunday Best.
It’s especially powerful now that the US government is openly racist again.
Whaling ships of the era often had mannequin parts on board.
That concludes our comedy cruise for this week, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for being you. If you enjoy what we do and that we don’t harass you with pop-up ads and stuff, help us keep it this way by buying a few T-shirts and hats, or via the other links below. It’ll put smiles on our comical faces.
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Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
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Watch my pitch video and become a supporter of Peyote Cowboy here.
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