Have You Heard the Good News?

Bizarro is brought to you today by I'll Never Eat Peanut Butter Again.

It isn't often you see a cartoon that combines the darkness of deadly disease with childhood candy icons, and that's just the sort of experience that Bizarro hopes to provide from time to time. I don't know if anyone else likes this cartoon, but I'm sort of proud of it.

I don't eat M&Ms anymore because I'm vegan and they have milk chocolate in them, but I used to love them. It's not so bad to have an ethical reason to avoid things like M&Ms, though (I say that because health reasons wouldn't be enough to keep me away from them). It's a good way to avoid unnecessary calories. I used to be really hooked on milk chocolate and didn't like dark chocolate much at all, but now that it is the only kind I will eat, I've developed a taste for it and love it. I tried a bite of milk chocolate not long ago and thought it was really wimpy. Dark chocolate is actually good for you (if not sweetened with sugar) so it's one of my acceptable vices. As opposed to heroin*, which my doctor told me to cut back on.

*Note to children and gullible adults: I don't use heroin.

Late addition: A reader wrote to me about this post and mentioned that much of the world's chocolate is harvested by slaves (many are children) and that it is important to choose "fair trade" chocolate. Which I always do. I should have mentioned that, thanks for the correction! Here's a quick article explaining that and a list of companies that do and don't use slave chocolate. As of this writing, Mars company, who makes M&Ms still uses slavery cocoa. http://fairchocolate.org/

Amazon Top 50

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


1 (-). Twilight: The Graphic Novel, Volume 1 *
2 (-). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
3 (-). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
4 (-). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
5 (-). Diary of a Wimpy Kid
6 (N). I am an alien. I have a question 01
7 (-). The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
8 (+24). Planetary Vol. 4: Spacetime Archaeology
9 (R). Warriors: Ravenpaw's Path #2: A Clan in Need *
10 (-4). Kick-Ass
11 (-1). Fables Vol. 13: The Great Fables Crossover
12 (+4). Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
13 (+8). Watchmen
14 (-23). Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume
15 (-7). Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight Volume 6: Retreat
16 (-5). Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
17 (+16). The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes
18 (+4). Batman: The Killing Joke
19 (-2). Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
20 (+7). Batman: Arkham Asylum (15th Anniversary Edition)
21 (-1). Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
22 (+2). Batman: Year One
23 (-12). The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
24 (+23). Stitches: A Memoir
25 (+19). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
26 (+12). The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks
27 (+9). Asterios Polyp
28 (+6). Twelve Kingdoms, The - Hardcover Edition Volume 4: Skies of Dawn
29 (R). Batman: The Long Halloween
30 (+9). Tales from the Crypt #8: Diary of a Stinky Dead Kid
31 (R). The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House
32 (R). Starman Omnibus Vol. 4
33 (-20). The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition
34 (N). Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure!, Vol. 6
35 (+14). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
36 (+14). The Complete Persepolis
37 (R). The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
38 (-20). All Star Superman, Vol. 2
39 (+9). Marvel Encyclopedia
40 (-28). Dark Tower: The Fall of Gilead
41 (-22). Invincible Iron Man Omnibus, Vol. 1 *
42 (R). Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War, Vol. 1
43 (+3). Bleach, Vol. 30
44 (R). The Sandman Vol. 3: Dream Country
45 (R). Batman: R.I.P.
46 (N). Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev Omnibus, Vol. 2
47 (R). Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War, Vol. 2
48 (R). Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds



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

N = New listing appearing on list for first time
R = Item returning to the list after having been off for 1 or more weeks


Commentary:

* Well that was an exciting week! The big glitch that hit over the weekend caused many large ticket GNs distributed to the book trade by Diamond soar up the Amazon bestseller charts, only to see them disappear after the error was corrected. This then had a rebound effect later in the week as Amazon pulled their sales listings for all comics distributed by Diamond. The biggest losers chart-wise in all of this are books like the latest Buffy collection, which was not really affected by the $14.99 price point but sees its Amazon sales pulled anyway; so instead of enjoying big sales its first week in release it is unavailable from Amazon.

* This is the first week since I started keeping these charts (over a year ago) that V for Vendetta has not been on the list (it would be at #51).

* Debuting way up at #6 is I am an alien. I have a question, a kindle-only comic that is selling for just $1.

*Twilight watch: It's #37 on the overall list, and actually goes on sale next week...

NO CONTEST TODAY

High School Stereotypes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Future CEOs.

I'm sorry to say that my high school class has not had many successful reunions. The 10th, in 1986, was reportedly large and well-attended but I missed that one. They've tried it a few times since, I went to a couple, but there were very small turnouts.

Mine was not a stereotypical high school experience, I attended a magnet school that tended to attract kids that did not "fit in" at their neighborhood schools, so many of my classmates were really smart or artistic or musical or unusual in one way or another. (That is to say that most of us were the kid on the ground in this cartoon.) This led to a lot of interesting adult careers, spread out all over the globe, but we were by nature a class of more independent sorts, thus making it difficult to get everyone together again. At least that's been my impression. Either that or they're having fabulous reunions every few years and I've just not been invited.

I was never beaten up by a jock for being brainy, like this poor kid, but I was regularly called a "fag" by redneck types because I was artistic and didn't dress like Ted Nugent. This didn't happen at my high school, Ted Nugent types tended not to apply or get accepted there, but it happened in other parts of my hometown of Tulsa. Thanks, Booker T. Washington High School, for saving me from a miserable high school career as an outcast.

I think it would be fun to have a large high school reunion but I've given up hoping for it. I'm content to run into them occasionally on the streets of New York and other places my classmates tended to escape to.

Pea in Your Ear

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Technological Advances.

When I was growing up, I remember hearing people remark about how amazed really old people must feel. "Just imagine! They were born during horse and buggy days and now we've sent a man to the moon and can watch it live on TV! Such an amazing time to be alive!"

Yes, it is remarkable but I'm guessing old people born in 1910 probably got just as bored at seeing amazing new inventions every ten years as we do at seeing them every ten seconds.

When I was small, there were four channels on TV if you could get the antennae to work, there were about five computers in the whole country, each filling an entire room, and if you didn't already have the bust line you wanted, you just had to get over it because there was no such thing as a boob job. Cable TV didn't exist. Recording was something you could do to sound, but recording pictures off of TV was crazy talk. Movies were something you could watch on TV once a week on Saturday night, or at one of the three movie theaters in town, each playing only one film each. Phones had wires that connected to the wall and you couldn't even unplug them. If you didn't want to be disturbed by its ringing, you left it off the hook. Nobody but tobacco executives knew that cigarettes caused cancer. Typewriters sounded like machine guns and to correct a mistake you had to use white paint. Dark-skinned people used different water fountains and restrooms and no one batted an eye. If you wanted to cook something you had to use heat and wait half an hour – "microwave" was a word only astrophysicists recognized. Larry King was a middle-aged guy on the radio.

But today if you told me that I could stick something the size of a pea pod in my ear and hear the thoughts of any person from the past 10,000 years, alive or dead, just by thinking about them, I'd nod my head and say, "cool." Nothing surprises me except what we can't do. I'm still surprised an airplane is the fastest way to get from L.A. to N.Y.C. How quaint. When are they going to work the bugs out of that teleportation thing? Airplanes bore me, even with 42 channels of TV in the back of the seat. I can't surf the web on my laptop while we're in the air? What am I, Abraham Lincoln?

Perhaps I was born too soon.

More Moto Hagio!

The news that Fantagraphics & Matt Thorne are teaming up for a new line of translated manga makes me happy. What makes me giddy is that their first release will be A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, a collection of some of Hagio's most important short stories. I've loved Hagio's work ever since reading A A' and They Were 11 way back in the day (when we bought our translated manga flipped, in floppies, and we liked it!) The fact that Hagio's oevre has been basically unavailable in English for years in nigh criminal, and I'm glad to see that Fantagraphics is taking steps to rectify this.

Be a Doll

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ventriloquism.

We finally have what passes for warm weather in New York City at this time of year and it has buoyed my spirits considerably. It's been in the low fifties for the past couple of days and it feels like Mexico. I rode my bike around Prospect Park yesterday dressed in something lighter than an Eskimo suit. It was glorious. Today I may go riding again, perhaps to the local dollar store to see if they have rubber sheets*, or across the Brooklyn Bridge to see how many tourists are mindlessly walking in the bike lane. Every year they repaint the signs and walkway markers and still somebody gets creamed.

For anyone who is not familiar enough with the mystical techniques of ventriloquism to understand this joke, just try to say a "B" without moving your lips. Ah, now you've discovered the magic of ventriloquism. Somehow, doll-wielding entertainment icons like Beverly Massegee can make the sound of a "B" inside their mouth and not with their lips! If you try it, it will sound like a "G." That's why all over the globe people flock to pay big bucks to see this rare art form.

*For use in making it easier to clean up after some of our foster animals.