The Art of Nudity
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 non-cartoon comments below.
Since January 2018, the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics have been written and drawn by my comics partner, Wayno. 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.
Greetings, jazzy pickle peoples,
It’s been a crazy week on Planet Earth, but rest assured that the house of cards the US Dunning-Kruger Cabal has built won’t stand forever. The (mad) King of (the) Heart(less) is starting to wobble.
Instead, let’s talk about the comic above.
I’ve long been fascinated by our species’ aversion to public nudity. Don’t jump to conclusions, I’m no nudist. I’m just as quick to throw on a shirt and a pair of pants before I leave the house as anyone else. But intellectually, I am acutely aware of the silliness of it.
For millions of years, we were as naked as every other animal on the planet. So what happened to make us ashamed and afraid of our own bodies? There are various theories about how we became so self-conscious and nudity-averse.
Going back tens of thousands of years, one obvious step resulted from our insatiable curiosity about what’s beyond the next mountain range. Once we traveled far enough from our more equatorial birthplace, it got cold, and we needed to cover ourselves.
But that can’t be the reason we still wear layers of clothing in the heat of summer.
Another theory is about ownership. When humans invented agriculture, they began to declare the piece of land on which they toiled for food as their own—a concept generally unknown to hunter-gatherers.
Once the concept of property was established, which children belonged to whom became more important, so men wanted to control who their women got sweaty with, and monogamy became fashionable to ensure birthright. Humans are visually oriented, so sexy bits were hidden to reduce temptation. Some cultures still exaggerate this custom by requiring women to wear tarpulins with no more than a tiny screened window to peek out of. (Even though anyone who has raised a teenager knows that taboos only serve to increase curiosity.)
In recent times, some psychologists have theorized that clothing is a means to avoid being reminded of our mortality as animals. That sounds logical.
(An amusing aside: some anthropologists have surmised that the reason human females are the only mammals that have noticeable chest bumps when not breastfeeding their young is an evolutionary trick to make them resemble buttocks. Before primitive humans began walking upright, the female buttocks were the visual cue that encouraged mating. Under this premise, boobs are chest-butts. One cleavage is as exciting as another. I told you it was amusing.)
These are all good theories, and I don’t have a favorite—except for the chest-butt premise—but I suspect that artists like to employ nudity for a couple of reasons: to depict the beauty of our natural form, and to strip away the personas we project with our clothing.
My cartoon above is a simple reversal of societal tendencies. In a world where nudity is common, artists might be inspired to turn the convention upside-down and depict the opposite.
Even if you don’t think it’s funny, I hope you appreciate how rare it is to be able to sneak that much nudity into the Sunday comics section.
P.S. Some of my Peyote Cowboy readers have asked when the next episode is coming out. I took some time off to dust off my brain, but am back at the grindstone and should post a new episode this week!
Now it’s time to turn our frowns upside down with Wayno’s week of Bizarro cartoons.
Virtual lawns can be mown with just a click of a button, Dad. Just saying.
I blame the people who taught this guy to read.
In Spanish, “Nosferatu” translates to “our feratu.”
This would be even funnier if it didn’t ring so true.
I wasn’t the only one to sneak forbidden topics into the comics pages this week.
She’s not alone. The entire western world now realizes the danger of ignoring the red flags of a narcissist.
That’s this week’s comedy salvo, Jazz Pickles. We hope you escaped injury. If you enjoy what we do and that we and that we do it for free, please consider helping us keep it that way and living indoors via one of the support portals below. We’ll send you jumbo-sized love.
The Naked Cartoonist…My every-other-week creative-writing subscription 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.
Super fun Bizarro swag from ComicsKingdom, including our 2026 Bizarro wall calendar.