Feet Bigger than Your Stomach
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.
Welcome, Jazz Pickles.
This past week saw me traveling the West Coast of the Previously United States, while my partner in graphic comedy, Wayno, traveled to Boston to attend the National Cartoonists Society’s yearly convention and awards ceremony.
Both Wayno and I have been nominated for and won awards from the NCS more than once, but after winning last year, this was not Wayno’s year to add extra weight to his luggage. We are nonetheless proud that his work with Bizarro was nominated in the NCS’s Newspaper Panel category once again.
While I was creeping up the West Coast with my life partner, Olive Oyl, we stopped off to do a tour of Hearst Castle. This is the absurdly opulent monument to himself that William Randolph Hearst spent nearly 30 years building, during the Great Depression, no less.
While I don’t approve of spending an enormous fortune building museum-sized shrines to oneself at a time when so many others are dumpster-diving for their meals, the property and its story are pretty fascinating.
You can check Wikipedia for the full story, but the part that is relevant to me at this point in history is that William Randolph Hearst—“Billy Randy,” as those of us in his emply now call him—built a media empire that includes King Features, the newspaper syndication arm of the Hearst Corporation, which has syndicated Bizarro since 2004. (I was with two other syndicates in the first 19 years of my career.)
It occurred to me while touring the castle that, as I was experiencing the results of Hearst’s private life on the West Coast, Wayno was on the East Coast hobnobbing with a few employees of King Features, one of the remnants of the media empire Hearst began over a hundred years ago.
And it did not escape me that although Hearst began his career as a progressive liberal, defending the working class against the excesses of the wealthy few, he eventually shifted to the dark side and became a robber baron of the Gilded Age, eventually supporting Hitler’s Nazi party, calling it the “savior of Europe.” That knowledge, and the absurd over-ornamentation of every room of his “castle,” reminded me of the pendulum of history that is perpetually on auto-repeat.
Once everyone who can remember what it was like under an oppressive regime is gone, their descendants are increasingly vulnerable to buying the same lies and dishonest hype of the uber-hoarders and power-hungry, and voluntarily submitting to the uncomfortable confines under their thumbs once again.
My parents remember the hardships of the Great Depression and the tremendous relief of FDR’s policies that followed, but they are in their nineties now and about to bid farewell to this dimension. And, right on cue, here we go again, with a robber baron in the White House, tarting it up with gold accessories like a Russian bordello, in an attempt to convince his terrified ego that he deserves to be worshipped like a king.
The only good news here is that a pendulum always swings back. I’ve no guess how long it will take, but I’m certain that socially responsible governance is not gone for good.
And, lucky for us, socially responsible humor isn’t gone, either. Let’s have a few guilt-free chuckles with Wayno’s award-winning Bizarro cartoons for the week.
It’s better than an overly attached garage with severe separation anxiety.
How are you with listening to the same Mamas and Papas song all day every day?
And yesterday is a bit farther.
The self-driving car will eliminate the need to drive yourself crazy by doing it for you.
The weird punctuation helps you simulate William Shatner’s unique verbal cadence.
With more expensive suits, these two would fit perfectly in the current administration’s cabinet.
We’ve reached the end of construction on this week’s comedy castle. Note the lack of crappy gold gewgaws. If you enjoy what we do here for free, please help us keep it that way via the links below. We’ll be humbly grateful.
The Naked Cartoonist…My every-other-week subscription creative writing and comics service.
Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
WAYNO’S TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
My (free) graphic novel in progress, PEYOTE COWBOY
Watch my pitch video and become a supporter of Peyote Cowboy here.
Signed, numbered, limited-edition prints and original Bizarro panels
COMICS KINGDOM SHOP Now with Bizarro shirts, prints, & other crap!
