The Player

Bizarro is brought to you today by Cat Zombies.

As a teen, I worked as a busboy in a restaurant with a piano bar. I was fascinated by the old drunks that sat around the piano every night "singing" to the show tunes coughed up by Morey, who wore a tux and had a phony smile cemented to his face. At the time I was in a band, a typical teenage rock star wannabe, and felt sorry for Morey. I imagined that when he was my age, he dreamed of throngs of appreciative music lovers at Carnegie Hall, or a theater on Broadway. He likely taught music lessons to dopey kids during the day to make ends meet.

Making a living as a musician is a nearly impossible task and most people give it up eventually and get a "real" job, maybe play in a hobby band at night. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, music is one of those things you do because you love it.

After a few years of playing weekend nights around the Southwest, I gave up my band to concentrate on becoming a cartoonist. It worked out well for me, I beat the odds with a lot of luck and a bit of hard work and have thanked my lucky stars ever since. I still love music, however, and though I was the singer and never learned to play anything, I still long to be in a hobby band. I recently started to learn to play guitar for reals, as the kids say. It's monstrously fun and I wonder why I didn't do this years ago.

The guitar in the cartoon is fashioned after my own Gibson ES-137. It is tied for my favorite inanimate object that I own, the other being my '82 Vespa. The thought of drunks resting their cocktails on it (my guitar, not my scooter) as they blather out the words to "That's Entertainment" (the one by Schwartz and Dietz, not by The Jam) makes me cringe.

You're welcome to rest your drinks on my Vespa, however. It's waterproof.

Fetus Fiesta

Bizarro is brought to you today by Click n' Pop.

This is one of the strangest and darkest comics I've ever published in Bizarro. The idea came from the strange and dark Malo, a virtual hermit who lives in Greenland somewhere and only communicates with people via emails and piano sonatas.

He sends me twisted ideas all the time, the vast majority of which are too dark and twisted to be allowed in the funny pages. But this one was very close to the line and I liked it a lot so I asked my editor his opinion, and he said "go for it." Or some more educated equivalent.

I wondered if I might get some negative mail, but so far nothing. I did get one note from an OB/GYN clinic that wanted to use it in some literature they pass out to their preggernauts about not smoking or drinking during their pregnancy. A fairly hip clinic, I'd say.

Le Chick Cam

Please enjoy this live cam from Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary responsibly.

As happens frequently this time of year we received a call from a school teacher looking for a home for 5 just-hatched chicks -- the living, breathing result of a classroom project. As cute as these fuzzballs are, they will grow into larger hens and roosters who have a lot of space and care requirements, and can live for over a decade.

If you're a parent or student who hears of an upcoming hatching project, please encourage that teacher to consider more humane alternatives to hatching.

In the meantime, they're ridiculously cute, so during daytime hours EST you can see them live:


Financial times are tough for us all and even worse for charities. But for only a few bucks a month you can help these homeys get by. Anyone who donates to their care automatically becomes my BFF. For reals. Awesome. Dude.

BTW: that's a child's teddy bear in the cage, not roadkill.

My Monsterhood

Bizarro is brought to you today by Live Chick Cam.

When I do jokes about cosmetic surgery, people sometimes assume I am against it. Far from it. I am not only totally in favor of cosmetic surgery, it saved my life.

If you're not familiar with my breathtaking looks, have a glance at the photos at the top of this page. Most people think that nature blessed me with an incredibly fortunate combination of genes, but it is not true. In fact, not unlike Frankenstein's monster, I came into this world as a hideous beast that sent children and adults alike running in terror. As I got older, the problem only got worse. My parents feared I would be doomed to a life of solitude and failure.

Then everything changed one day when I was 17 years old. My mom and I were on our way to the grocery store (I was banned from the store because I made the other customers too sick to buy food, but I enjoyed the ride) when she ran over something that she thought was a dog. Mother screeched to a halt and jumped out of the car, as no one in my family could turn down free meat. But alas, it was not a dog we had hit but a man. A man who was under the car and still alive. A man who was the most gifted plastic surgeon in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

When I leaned down to look under the car all I could see was a dark lumpy shadow pinned beneath the transmission. From the darkness of that twisted shape came the words I will remember for as long as I live, "I can fix that."

One year later, the good doctor was walking with only the aid of a cane and I was a new man. Doors of opportunity that I never dreamed possible with my hideous former face were thrown open like sphincters at a colonoscopy convention. By the time I was 26, I was given a syndication contract for Bizarro based on my looks alone.

The rest is history.

Talk to the Tongue

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Highland Park Cloning Institute.

After yesterday's contentious religious post, this seems a good mindless followup cartoon. This could have been funnier if it had been in reference to the porn industry, but newspapers don't allow that sort of topic on the funny pages, so here we are. I still like the gag, though.

I was once hired to do some art for a California winery and part of that gig was hanging out for a weekend in Napa with serious wine fans (I feel like there's a name for them other than "gourmet"–"wino" doesn't seem quite right, "wine nerd" is too derrogatory), vintners, tasters, those sorts. I wasn't that into wine at the time, so it was an alternately interesting and boring weekend, but there were moments when I was tempted to burst out laughing inappropriately like a kid in church.

My fondest memory is of a large, stately room fashioned after a European castle, with a huge, carved oak table in the middle of the room, an enormous ornate mirror, big Renaissance-style paintings, probably a suit of armor. Our group of about 20 were seated around the table and given various glasses of wine to taste. Since it was midday and we weren't supposed to get drunk, we were also given spit glasses. As the tasting began, the room fell silent and all one could hear for the next 20 minutes was the sound of spitting. As I looked around the room and saw well-dressed white folks in such a pompous setting swishing and splurching, staying focused was challenging.

I wish I'd thought to bring a colossal prosthetic tongue with me. Might have lightened up the occasion, albeit in a Homer Simpson sort of way.

A Brief (and Incomplete) History of DC Price Increases

I originally wrote this as a comment over on a post by Johanna at Comics Worth Reading. Seeing as it's fairly substantial (and we're somewhat lacking in actual content at YACB lately) I figured it was worth posting here:

Most people remember the DC explosion/implosion (or at least have heard about it from us old-timers). The explosion was when they raised their prices from 35¢ to 50¢ and increased the story page count from 17 to 25 (and as previously noted, also added a bunch of titles). As we all know it bombed (for all sorts of reasons) and DC soon dropped the story page count back down to 17 and dropped the price to 40¢. So comics still cost more, you just didn’t get anything for the extra cost.

What many people forget is that just a few years later, DC once again raised their prices to 50¢ and added 8 more story pages (again, mostly through back-up stories, but within a few years the extra pages ended up become part of the main story); this time the increase worked and the price & page count stuck.

Later when they increased to 60¢, the story page count was increased to 27 pages!

Back in the day, an increase in price nearly always was accompanied by an increased in perceived value: either more pages, better quality paper, fewer ads, etc. Then as time went on, that value would be whittled away, until the next price increase and the cycle continued.

I see adding more pages with an accompanying price increase from $3 to $4 as being more tenable than Marvel’s “we’ll increase our prices to $4 on our top titles and you’ll smile and like it” approach. But then I’m probably sadly wrong…

Dubious Reunions

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Miracle Messiah Tree of Jacksonville, Florida.

When I was a tiny, oppressed, terrified Catholic School boy I began wondering about the afterlife and its myriad possibilities. Like most children of religious families, my own indoctrination was confusing: on the the one hand we were told that only our "soul" goes to heaven and our earthly body returns to dust, but all of the drawings we were asked to color in Sunday School, paintings in the Vatican, and stained glass windows in the church had people who looked like they did in life.

Then there is Hell, where everyone is all tortured and burning for eternity while their skin melts and peels and falls off, only to melt and peel and fall off again every second of every day for eternity. The burning and melting isn't enough pain for someone raised in the wrong culture (non-Christian), of course, so hideous creatures jab them with pointy sticks, too. What good would any of that deliciously sadistic torment be if you didn't have your body? Ever try to set a soul on fire and poke it with a stick? Good luck.

And if you do spend eternity with your body, wouldn't it be better to die young? Who wants to be bald, fat, tired and achy for eternity? I'd much rather have the body I had at 25. Listening to my grandparents complain about their health in their golden years led me and a handful of my more philosophical schoolmates to form a suicide cult in the second grade. We would have pulled it off, too, until one of us with a big brother told us how cool pubic hair was and we all decided to wait until at least then.

If, however, we are without our bodies and are pure "soul," how will we recognize each other? When people have the fabled "near death experience" that is becoming so popular these days, they always report having seen their dead relatives. (Which would be enough to scare me back to life, too.) Are these avatars that the "souls" have conjured up so you'll recognize them, or is Nana stuck with that deflated parade-balloon body and thin hair that she had when she died? Doesn't sound like there is much bliss in her eternity. I'm sure she'd much rather be the babe that attracted Gramps when he returned from WWII.

The nicest thing about this game is that you can change the rules as you go, make it whatever you want. It is comforting to believe you're going to a better place when you die and there are as of yet no images or reports from the other side, so make it what you want it to be.

Personally, I'm hoping for oblivion, the same experience I had before I was born. I get bored easily and can't imagine doing anything for eternity. As Mark Twain supposedly said when asked how he could face eternity as an atheist, "I was dead for billions of years before I was born and it didn't inconvenience me in the least."