Fools in Love
A couple of bat-men share stories over drinks.
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 blog post this week has some very fun extras.
And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.
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Welcome, Pickles of Jazz. This week’s Sunday cartoon (above) is about the inevitabilities of romantic partnership. What starts as an exhilarating flight with a superhero necessarily devolves into a morass of drab, domestic conflicts.
After a few flights of fancy that don’t make it past the heady, intoxication stage, most of us begin to understand the extreme difference between love and infatuation. That doesn’t mean we won’t fall for infatuation’s habit of masquerading as “true love” again and again (most of us do), but if we work at it, and the partnership can endure the friction, we can get past this disillusion and onto something deeper and more lasting.
My wife, whom I’ve called Olive Oyl on this blog for years, is an artist and writer named Christy Higgins. Her essays explore what she has learned about her complex psychological landscape through a couple of degrees in psychology and an immense amount of personal exploration. Her writing is often full of truths about herself that many people would consider too personal to divulge to the public, but she finds great healing in this kind of truth-telling.
Her latest essay, “My Animus Problem—Part II: Bad Boy,” is about how unresolved trauma in her childhood led her to chase “bad boys” in her romantic life. And I am the most recent in a long line of bad boys she has caught. Among other things, she says this about our relationship:
“It was hard not to put Dan on a pedestal in the early days of our yet-unwedded love. He was a terrifically talented, well-known syndicated cartoonist and fine artist: his sharp intellect, wit, humor, and charm were his calling card, all of which I found incredibly sexy and exciting. He was my kind of Bad Boy: he bucked the system, challenged conventions, and made a good living as a creative person despite having no education beyond high school.”
All right! So far so good! I like what I’m reading. But later, she says this:
“His charm took on a duller sheen and his humor now felt dark, sarcastic, and bleak. This was the shadow of our relationship slowly taking form. Was my cool, famous, cultural Bad Boy really just a talented asshole in disguise?”
Whoops. She figured me out. Damn! But we’re still married, so…
To find out how she got from A to B to where we are now, you can read her essay here. It’s also got a handful of photos of us from our dating and motorcycle years which you’ll likely find anywhere from charming to ridiculous. (Which would you call the one below?)
Photo by Christy Higgins
Q: Charming bad boy or talented asshole? A: Yes.
Despite the embarrassingly honest review of my character that it contains, I found her essay both fascinating and enlightening. It has inspired me to write an essay of my own about my darker corners and our relationship in a future edition of The Naked Cartoonist. I can be as brutally honest as she can. (wink, wink.)
That concludes my weekly ad for my subscription newsletter. You can subscribe or find out more here.
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For now, let’s see what brutal honesty Wayno used for comic effect in his Bizarro cartoons for the week…
Are you old enough to remember when dentists used to give out sugary candy as a reward for being a good patient? Or when oncologists used to give out cigarettes?
This one was inspired by current events, which I’ll leave to your interpretation.
The custard pie and squirting flower can’t be far behind.
There have been lots of questions about this one. The forehead mirror disk was used to reflect light into the patient’s orifices before that thing in his hand was invented.
Not exactly a page-turner, but it can haunt you for the rest of your life.
Little-known historical fact: Ahab’s great-great-great grandson became obsessed with “the great, bespectacled tuna.”
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