Bizarro | Naked Cartoonist

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Swingers

I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.

Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Secret Symbols in the Sunday comic, above.——————————————————

Welcome Jazz Pickles and other Internetters. The comic above is about texting while driving so you may be wondering if I have something to say about that topic. I have only this: you might kill somebody so don’t be an idiot; your super-important comments about whatever can wait until you’re not operating a deadly weapon.

Instead, let’s talk about Tarzan. When I was a kid, I loved the old black-and-white Tarzan movies. An Olympic swimmer named Johnny Weissmuller played him in most of the ones I watched and he was an adorably bad actor. The only reason he could get away with his halted delivery was because he was supposed to have been raised by apes and didn’t learn to speak a human language until he was an adult. But even with that justified excuse, he seemed like a bad actor. And that was part of the fun.

I love a certain type of bad acting. Adam West as Batman in the late sixties comes to mind. I think I imprinted on that style of corny sincerity early on and I still love it. William Shatner in the original Star Trek episodes is another perfect example. I never believed those papier-mâché rocks and perfectly-level TV studio floors were on an alien planet, but I could see how badly Shatner wanted me to believe it and that was enough. 

But as a boy, I was not yet aware of the camp value of Tarzan. What I loved about Tarzan movies was the excitement of living so close to nature, with all of the special skills a jungle lifestyle would require. Tarzan didn’t even have a TV on which to watch his own movies but I envied him. He couldn’t recite the multiplication tables but he could swing on vines across the jungle faster than a stampede of spooked zebras could gallop toward a cliff (only to be saved by him getting there first and shouting a zebra word at them). He couldn’t read a fast food menu but he could communicate with animals—the friendly ones like elephants and chimps, anyway—and emerge victorious over the dangerous ones like lions and crocodiles in hand-to-hand combat. Sure, he had a knife in one of those hands but his opponents had claws and big jaws full of razor-sharp teeth so he was still the clear underdog. No one ever told Tarzan to comb his hair or tuck in his shirt. He didn’t even wear pants.

As technology moves exponentially faster and the “human world” becomes increasingly unfamiliar, I find myself instinctively wanting to return to a more Tarzanian life, one closer to nature. But who am I kidding? What would happen if there were only a loincloth and a kitchen knife between me and NATURE? Whatever the result, I suspect it would not take long and it would not be pretty.

Every now and then I despair at the thought that I don’t really know how to survive on my native planet. In the wild—the normal world, as it is without human manipulations—my life expectancy would be measured in a matter of hours, not years. I can rent a room but I can’t build a shelter; I can find a “gas station near me” in seconds but if I were faced with finding a water source in the wild, unless I came across a stalled beer truck or tripped over a canoe and fell into a lake, I’d be a goner in no time.  

My wife and I regularly criticize ourselves for this obvious shortcoming and talk about taking some kind of survival course. But that would eat into the time we spend blogging, watching fascinating TV series, and answering emails, so we’ve still not gotten around to it. Maybe next year things will calm down and we’ll be able to learn to feed ourselves.

But before we slip into our loincloths, let’s amuse ourselves with Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week…

They’ll have to cook him first, which I think is the more immediate concern.

Sure, you can find it in one guy but try a whole stack of scarecrows.

The Scrabble gods seem to enjoy humiliating me by granting me nothing but consonants.

I raced through infancy and toddlerhood so fast I can barely remember them. The next sixty-something years are a blur, too.

The ins and outs of facial wood.

The adolescent in me wonders if they’ve got snowballs.

We’ve come to the end of our weekly chuckle nuggets, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for your fermented attention. If you enjoy what we do and that we do it for free, without ads or clickbait, please consider helping us keep it that way via one or more of the links below. We’ll be instantly happier than if you didn’t.

Until next time, keep your carrot clean.

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