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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

The week’s Bizarro cartoons and a charming chat about sidekicks and make-believe.

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 question of whether the puppet at right is yearning for freedom from an unseen overlord or intending to end his life suddenly occurred to me as I posted this today and has inspired me to write an essay about that question in The Naked Cartoonist in the very near future. As usual, it will be philosophical comedy or comedic philosophy.

As for today’s cartoon…

The act (if not the art) of writing has become exponentially easier in my lifetime. I took a typing class in 9th grade and still contend it was the most valuable thing I learned in school. I have typed exponentially more often than I have solved for x…

Around eight or ten years ago, King Features asked me to move my blog to their Comics Kingdom website. I like KF, they’ve done right by me, but I decided against it for several reasons, chief among them was that you’d have to have a subscription to that site to read my posts. (The second reason was that every page of that site was drenched in purple and yellow and it made me a little nauseous. I couldn’t see Bizarro bedecked in that manner.) They’ve recently redesigned the whole site and it’s much better, but I’m still staying here.

The week’s cartoons and a FREE article from my subscription newsletter The Naked Cartoonist.

It’s a politically scary time on planet Earth. But it’s important to note that this is neither the first, nor the scariest time our species has experienced, by a long shot.

You could fill a volume the size of the Manhattan phonebook (trust me, they were huge and the type was tiny) with a list of the catastrophes humans have caused and/or endured in our brief time here, but I won’t attempt to cite them. Just know that …

I can’t decide if I’m a gambler or not…

A new episode falls from the sky.

When my kids were small, I took them to Disney World and that place is crawling with big, foam-rubber characters altering the reality and future expectations of countless children. That was when I first started thinking about the people inside those things. (The character costumes, not the children.)

Both Wayno and I have drawn numerous cartoons inspired by his work and it wasn’t until I picked up my (digital, inkless, electronic) pen to write this post that I realized why: surrealism and (our kind of) cartoons are two approaches to the same thing.

I once read that even though it can be brutal, sibling rivalry is completely natural. While our parents are our lifeline, our siblings are the opposite—competitors for resources. If there’s not enough food for the whole family, the more selfish or aggressive offspring eats while the other goes hungry or gets left in the forest…

A story about one of my kids emerging from a closet I didn’t know they were in.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years trying to understand nutrition and have come to a conclusion: Conclusions are pointless. At least for now…

Today’s cartoon is about the “Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” Like many children’s rhymes and stories, it’s been sanitized a bit over time. The third and fourth line, which I’d never heard before I researched it for this post, take the story in a whole other direction.

The expression “shrink” is short for “head shrinker,” which I suppose is a reference to certain cannibalistic tribes who shrunk the heads of their enemies…

Perhaps the character Tarzan is so enduring because he reminds us of ourselves. He was raised by apes, just like we all were…