Revised Evil

In the previous post, I recounted some of my adventures in Indianapolis this week, including a trip to a school. I included a picture of myself with the kids and claimed that nobody noticed I was "roaring drunk." This earned me a trip to the principal's office.

Yesterday I received an email from a school official thanking me politely for coming to the school and telling me everyone enjoyed it, but asking if I would take the picture off the blog. Apparently, school officials and parents could come down hard on the school for allowing their kid's pics on the web, especially in association with a reference to drinking. Here is the revised photo, with the student's faces blurred like criminals, which I supplanted the old one with in the post below, along with a humorous legal disclaimer (in red).Perhaps there are good reasons to be worried about a thing like this, but for the life of me I can't think what they would be. I know pedophiles have met kids online, but that doesn't pertain to this. I know celebs protect the images of their children to make it more difficult for would-be kidnappers, but that's certainly not an issue here. People in witness protection don't want pics on the web identifying their location, I suppose one or more of these kids could be from a family like that.

Mostly, I think it's just goofy paranoia. Fear of the unknown. I've met people before who don't want a photo of them with me to appear on my blog and it always reminds me a bit of primitives being afraid to have their picture taken for fear they will lose their soul.

I do want to emphasize that the faculty at the school was great, very appreciative and cool, and that the person who wrote to me was not being unreasonable. That person is only trying to protect his/her school from a doody storm from less reasonable factions.

And now my own disclaimer: Maybe there is some perfectly logical, obvious reason for objecting to a picture like this on my blog and I'm just not seeing it. If so, I apologize for the sarcasm.

Amazon Top 50

Here are the Top 50 Graphic Novels on Amazon this afternoon. All the previous caveats apply.

1 (-). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
2 (+1). Watchmen (paperback)
3 (+1). Diary of a Wimpy Kid
4 (+1). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
5 (-3). Amazing Spider-Man #583 Barack Obama Variant
6 (+2). Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
7 (-1). Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
8 (+3). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
9 (+3). Watchmen (hardcover)
10 (+3). The Complete Persepolis
11 (-4). The Joker
12 (-2). The Walking Dead, Vol. 9: Here We Remain
13 (+4). Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
14 (-). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
15 (-6). Batman: The Killing Joke
16 (-). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
17 (+10). Crown Of Horns (Bone)
18 (N). Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son *
19 (-4). Serenity, Vol. 2: Better Days
20 (+6). V for Vendetta
21 (N). Naruto, Volume 35 *
22 (+3). Secret Invasion *
23 (N). Naruto, Volume 34 *
24 (N). Naruto, Volume 37 *
25 (N). Naruto, Volume 36 *
26 (-7). Batman: Year One
27 (-5). Wolves at the Gate (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 3)
28 (-7). Batman: Arkham Asylum
29 (+16). The Long Way Home (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Vol. 1)
30 (+2). Batman: R.I.P. *
31 (-). Batman: The Long Halloween
32 (-3). Watchmen (Absolute Edition)
33 (N). Ultimate Origins *
34 (N). Scott Pilgrim Volume 5: Scott Pilgrim vs The Universe *
35 (+3). Alliance (Star Wars: Legacy, Vol. 4)
36 (-2). The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
37 (-19). Fables, Vol. 11: War and Pieces
38 (-15). The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes
39 (-15). American Born Chinese
40 (-10). The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
41 (-8). The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
42 (-22). Serenity, Vol. 1: Those Left Behind
43 (+4). What It Is
44 (-2). Secret Invasion, Book 2 (New Avengers, Vol. 9)
45 (N). Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life
46 (N). Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores
47 (N). Y: The Last Man, Vol. 2: Cycles
48 (+1). The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House
49 (-12). Escape from the Forest (Warriors: Tigerstar and Sasha, No. 2)
50 (-11). No Future For You (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 2)

Items with asterisks (*) are pre-order items.

Comments:

* Four Naruto pre-orders make the list for the fist time; I suspect maybe they were just added to Amazon this past week?

* The fifth Scott Pilgrim also make a pre-order appearance; and interestingly it brings the first volume with it to the rankings.

* The top half of the list shows reasonable stability, while the bottom half shows some pretty wild swings.

Indy Blogosphere

The following is a special report from Indianapolis, Indiana, where I am embedded at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.

It is cold here where I have been since Monday, as one might gather from my swell lounging outfit pictured here. Even hanging around my luxurious hotel suite at the Residence Inn Marriott, I wear a mock turtle neck sweater, long johns, and some furry socks. I don't even take these off to sleep or shower, for fear that my pulse may drop below 40 bpm.

Meanwhile, the museum itself is very cool and the fine folks who brought me here are fine folks, indeed. All in all, I'm having a swell time.

Here is a list of the good and bad things I have learned since I got here:

Good: The Eiteljorg Museum is much larger and of higher quality than I expected. Before I came, I figured it to be some small, 7/11-sized outfit in a strip mall with a few tomahawks, moccasins and cowboy paintings. In truth, the architecture of the impressively enormous building is top notch, and the immense collection of art and artifacts inside is astounding. That's a real school bus in this picture, not a Matchbox model.

Bad: I had to get up before dawn to go talk to some high school kids in nearby Bloomington. The kids were cool and the talk went well, but come on. Dawn? I took this picture with my phone because I was alarmed at how much it looked like sunset, something I usually watch while eating breakfast.


Good: A giant made of bricks attacked the city some time ago and Peyton Manning defeated him and buried him up to his neck in front of an apartment building near downtown.








Bad: I became trapped inside a vending machine, the purpose of which I am unsure of.

















Good: I found a chicken made of plastic hair curlers.















Bad: I found a skyscraper with missing walls. No wonder there was nobody inside it, as I have mentioned, it is cold here.











Good: The kids I spoke to at Bloomington New Tech High School could not tell I was roaring drunk.

(Note to parents, school board officials, etc: I was NOT roaring drunk, nor even tipsy while at the school. Nor was I high on any other drug, illegal or prescription. The previous comment is a JOKE made solely by the author of this blog and DOES NOT represent the thoughts or opinions of Bloomington New Tech High School officials, faculty,administrators, students, PTA, parents, relatives, neighbors, clergymen, or pets of anyone even vaguely affiliated with anything anywhere. The faces of the students in the picture have been blurred to protect them from identity theft.)




Also Good: I found out from this old Indian print that I might have some Native American blood in me. I may even be the descendant of a chief. Very cool.

If you're within a 10-hour drive of Indy, you should come to the museum Saturday and Sunday and check it out. Saturday I'll be with a couple other cartoonists doing a panel discussion about Native Americans in the comics, and Sunday I'll be doing my own comedy talk about my Cowboy and Indian cartoons from the past couple decades of Bizarro.

Yee haw, yippy-i-o-ki-aye. (sp?)

Clam Shells of Comedy

Bizarro is brought to you today by Nature's Cruelty.

This cartoon idea came from my good buddy, Richard Cabeza. It is a simple pun, but a funny one with a good pic. I got a number of emails from readers who really liked it, including one from a woman who said it had particularly spoken to her since she had just gone bra shopping.

You just never know when a cartoon is going to touch someone's life.

I am still in Indianapolis at this writing, which, if Columbus had thought he were in Japan instead of India when he arrived in the Bahamas, would be called Japaneseopolis. I think that's worth remembering.

It is cold here and the people are cruel. So cruel that they don't allow smoking anywhere in my hotel – not a single smoking room. So to smoke a cigar I have to go outside, bundled like the Michelin Man, and walk the streets like a common peasant. Why does life have to be so hard?

In contrast to the last few days when the temps were in the mid-to-low twenties during my peasant parades, today it was 40 degrees! This was much appreciated and the city felt just a little bit less cruel. Like 15 degrees less.

More in my next blog about the shenanigans and monkey shines that have ensued since I got here.

You know it would sell a fortune!

Marvel should put out a Spider-Man & Barack Obama mini-series. At this point it would be like printing money. C'mon, you know it would have at least as much legs as Marvel Zombies.

Wait, hold on... Presidential Zombies!

I'm running off to file a trademark application right now...

GN Discussion Group

Our Graphic Narrative Discussion Group met last week to choose our texts for the coming year. After a couple hours of deliberation, here's the schedule we decided upon:

• February: The Arrival by Shaun Tan
• April: Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
• June: The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
• August: Bookhunter and Fleep by Jason Shiga
• October: The Will Eisner Reader and The Best of the Spirit by Will Eisner
• December: Journey, vol. 1 by William Messner-Loebs

Looks like another good slate of comics!

Meteor Madness

Today's Bizarro is made possible by a grant from Plastic Playboys From Outer Space.

This is another of those comics that comes from a real life situation. One of my meteors was feeling poorly recently so I brought it to one of those McHospitals in the strip mall. You know, those places that are called things like "Medi-Quick" or "Bleed-No-More" or whatever, where med students at the bottom of their class end up.

Anyway, even though they would never admit it, they had trouble diagnosing what was wrong with my sizzling hot rock, and the scrip they gave us didn't do a thing. After another week, my meteor was feeling no better. It was then that I tossed him into the car and raced him down to Channel 6 to see an expert. The Action News Team's own Gil Watson and his AccuWeather Doppler Sky View fixed him up real good.

Thank you, Action News!