Gutsy Gastropods
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday comic above is mine, as are all of the comments below.
Since January 2018, the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics have been written and drawn by my comics partner, Wayno. They follow this commentary. For more fun, check out Wayno’s weekly blog post.
And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.
G’day, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for looking our way.
I published the cartoon above many years ago, and I like it so much I decided to revive it for another look.
Anyone remember Evel Knievel? He was one of America’s very first yahoos to become famous for being a yahoo.
Evel was a guy who dropped out of his Butte, Montana high school in the late fifties to spend more time jumping over things on his motorcycle and on skis.
Since jumping over things did not yet pay the big bucks, he got a job driving a big earth mover, during which he figured out a way to make it do wheelies, then accidentally wheelied it into Butte’s main power line, causing a big power outage. It also caused an adrenaline-addicted yahoo to lose his job driving an earth mover.
But he kept risking his neck, and by the mid-sixties, he started to get famous for jumping over things on his motorbike like rows of buses and the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
He fell down a lot, broke dozens of bones, many more than once, and underwent 14 major surgeries over his career to pin and plate him back together. His biggest televised stunt was attempting to jump over the Snake River Canyon in Idaho on a jet-powered motorcycle. My family watched it on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. It was a big deal.
Sitting on the floor in front of our giant, wooden console TV, I held my breath as he sat dressed in his white, starred & striped jumpsuit and matching cape, in what looked more like a rocket with a couple of tiny wheels sticking out of the bottom than a motorcycle. He ignited the engine, and flames spewed from the rocket’s butt as it sped toward a giant ramp at high speed, took off into the air over the immense canyon as cameras flashed, and his parachute immediately deployed, yanking him into the air where he floated slowly and anticlimactically to safety as the rocket floated up, then down into the canyon, crashing into the river. He claimed his parachute had malfunctioned. Uh-huh.
Like I said, a yahoo.
But I was a pre-teen when he was famous, and I watched his televised stunts with great admiration. This was before the “Don’t try this at home” mantra became a meme, and kids like my neighborhood friends and I may have been the reason it became routine.
There was a large field near our house, with a dirt path worn through the middle of it. It sat on a slope, so if you pedaled your Sting Ray bike as fast as you could from the top of the hill towards the bottom, you could get up a lot of speed. And if you stacked some old tires a few feet high and leaned a big piece of plywood on them at an angle, you could make a ramp that would launch you and your bike around four feet into the air, and you’d land somewhere around a dozen feet down the dirt path. And if you and your friends took turns doing this for a half-hour or so, Doug Gentry would eventually crash his bike on landing and break his arm, just like Evel Knievel had done so many times.
Unlike Evel Knievel, however, our parents then marched to that field, disassembled the ramp, destroyed or hid the components, and promised us that if we did anything like that again, we’d be sent to military school. There went that career plan.
I thought they overreacted, but decades later, I skied off a ramp at a resort in Tahoe and tore my ACL, requiring surgery. During the painful recovery and rehab process, I saw our parents’ point.
Shortly thereafter, I was inspired to create the comic above. And that’s how cartoons are made.
Time to see how Wayno’s Bizarro comics for the week have been made. (I happen to know he, too, wears a white jumpsuit and cape when he works.)
I’d concentrate on the whisky and leave the haggis for the Kraken.
I used to have a Bob Ross chia pet. I still miss it.
If there is a limit to the number of cartoons that can be made about the paleo diet, we have not yet reached it.
I’m not naming names, but it may have something to do with the I.Q. of the person in charge at HQ these days.
Here in Mexico, I’ve been forced to decide if I’m going to go with “cacti” or “cactuses.” I’ve chosen the latter.
People have said the same thing about the horned Viking helmet I wear around town.
And that’s how we’ll fade out today, JPs. If you’re enjoying our weekly visits and want to do something to help us keep them free, please consider doing so via one of the links below. We’ll both smile about you as we draw.
The Naked Cartoonist…My every-other-week creative-writing subscription service.
Limited edition, signed & numbered prints of BIZARRO CARTOONS, and some ORIGINALS!
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.
Super fun BIZARRO SWAG from ComicsKingdom, including women’s V-neck styles! (IF ORDERING FROM CANADA or anywhere outside the US, CHECK SHIPPING COSTS CAREFULLY!)