Archive: Bizarro

Post Content

Bizarro, 3/23/24

One of my goals in this blog is to get you all to appreciate the comics as a fundamentally visual medium. You could describe a comic where the punchline is that a chicken is working in a diner and serves eggs that it just laid. But what makes this comic good is the smug and just vaguely sexual expression on the chicken’s face, along with the human customer’s expression indicating that he gets everything that’s going on here, he’s extremely disgusted, and yet feels he has no choice but to eat the eggs anyway.

Dick Tracy, 3/23/24

You ever forget how many days there are in a week? You ever forget how many days there are in a week when your job involves creating a specific number of creative works tied to the number of days in a week? I think a nice thing to do if you find yourself in that situation is to just let your characters enjoy a nice dessert before moving on with their story.

Slylock Fox, 3/23/24

It’s truly demeaning what the animals in the Slylockverse had to put up with in the days and weeks after the moment when they achieved sentience but still had to obey outdated human law. It wouldn’t be long after the moment captured here when the dog would be wearing the police uniform and the policeman would be in a mass grave. The squirrel knows the horror that awaits!

Post Content

Bizarro and Six Chix, 2/2/24

Were you, as an adolescent, fascinated by Dante’s Inferno, and in particular by the book’s weird geography, in which hell is a kind of cone under the Earth’s surface, with each “circle” a ledge on which some ironic and awful punishment is dished out on unfortunate sinners? Or were you, unlike me, normal? If the former, you are truly primed to appreciate and perhaps even create today’s Six Chix, which some might fight offensive to Italians but I consider a true delight even though the pun is a little bit of a stretch. If the latter, you might produce today’s other Dante comic. Get it, OMG=”Divine” and LOL=”Comedy”? This is the product of the normie mind and frankly doesn’t deserve the label “bizarre” at all.

Pardon My Planet, 2/2/24

If one of your deep-seated fantasies is cruelly taunting women on social media for going to the bathroom, because you get off on the idea of them having to sit there uncomfortably and hold it until your issue your approval via Facebook comments, then I guess it’s better to write a syndicated newspaper comic strip about it than it is to actually do it? Like, more people will know about it from a comic, which is bad, because nobody should know about this, it’s obviously very shameful, but at least you’re not actually targeting any specific women, and women in general now have a pretty good sense that they should steer clear of you.

Beetle Bailey, 2/2/24

Ha ha, artificial intelligence, am I right? It would certainly be crazy if AI were to replace Beetle and Sarge. Now I know what you’re thinking: given that today’s strip involves a close up on our two characters whose facial expressions barely change and who are standing in a featureless, backgroundless void, how do we know that AI hasn’t already replaced them, in the sense of writing this strip? Well, just as an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to write a Beetle Bailey on this topic:

Yes, well, there you have it: the soulless machine produces dialogue even less funny than the Walker-Browne Humor Industries LLC sweatshop, somehow tries to drag things out over four panels like this is 1959 and the comics pages have infinite space to fill, gets minor details wrong (have you ever seen “polishing boots” as one of Beetle’s assigned tasks?), and seems to think that Beetle and Sarge like each other.

But what about comics bloggers? Could they be replaced by a shiny cybernetic robot?

I feel like this is something that would’ve shocked every ’60s sci-fi writer churning out pulp novels and short stories about killer robots while out of their mind on benzedrine, but the thing about AI is that it isn’t mean enough to be funny. It’s called the Comics Curmudgeon, you pablum-spewing chatbot! Get back to me when you’re prepared to say that Beetle and Sarge engaging in “banter” isn’t enjoyable for anyone!

Anyway, tune in next time, dear readers, as we explore the unpredictable landscapes of the funny pages. Until then, keep those comics coming, and don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments. Over and out!

Post Content

Bizarro, 12/6/23

A fun fact is that while “Frankenstein,” in the sense of a story about creature sewn together from corpses and reanimated via forbidden science with unexpected results, is in the public domain, Frankenstein’s monster, in the sense of the green-skinned corpse guy with a flat head and bolts in his neck, is the intellectual property of Universal Studios, for whom that design was created in 1931. I really had it in my mind that the flat top of the head was meant to indicate that the skull had been sliced open to drop a brain into it, but I can’t find any citation to that now; however, the Wikipedia article for Frankenstein’s monster does have the unsettling note that “Jack P. Pierce … based the monster’s face and iconic flat head shape on a drawing Pierce’s daughter (whom Pierce feared to be psychic) had drawn from a dream.” Anyway, today’s strip raises a lot more questions than it answers: are the Monster and his Bride having sex, reproductively, and are their corpse-mangled qualities passed down to their offspring via some Lamarckian mechanism? Or did the pair conspire to reproduce the sins of their creator, assembling in their own image a son from scavenged corpse parts, continuing the hideous cycle? Also, is the kid’s full name “Frankenstein’s Monster Junior,” and does he get mad if people just call him or his father “Frankenstein?” I honestly care about all this much more than his potential head injury situation.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/6/23

This week’s Rex Morgan is really just dragging out a plotline we had all hoped would be done by now, but honestly I’ve been enjoying a lot of the facial expressions so I’ll give it a pass. Today, Mr. Ollman (get it? he’s an “old man”????) has hit the end of his patience with this entire conversation, as his face in panel three makes very clear. “Look, doc, I came here because I need my prostate checked out and I heard you weren’t gonna give me a lot of pushback when I asked for a painkiller prescription. I stopped making new acquaintances 15 years ago, and I certainly don’t want to hear anything about some Italian I’m supposed to know, got it?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/6/23

It seems to me that you should be rewarding a budding young musician for time spent honing and practicing his craft in whatever way works best for; demanding a new song in exchange for each cookie feels like it’s encouraging quantity over quality, just my take.

Gasoline Alley, 12/6/23

Rufus’s dick has burst out of his elf costume, right? That’s what’s going on here? He’s hanging hog? That’s what’s going to get the beloved comic strip Gasoline Alley cancelled after all these years? Rufus with his dick out?