Massage Message

Bizarro is brought to you today by Imported Australian Massage Oil.

As super heroes go, I could use one with mad massage skills more often as just about any other power. If someone flew through my window once a day and gave me acupuncture and massage, I'd be as happy as Lois Lane.

For those of you planning to attend that big annual Bizarro Fan Convention at which people dress like my characters or me, stand in line for hours to get an autograph, exchange meaningless minutiae about my work and get aroused at rumors of a Bizarro movie directed by Peter Jackson, here's a bit of Bizarro trivia: The b/w image below has one fundamental difference from the color one at top, besides the lack of color. Can you find it?

Yes, it is the letter on the super hero's shirt. (Unless you guessed wrong, in which case, no, it is not the [whatever you guessed])

I originally intended this guy to be named "Captain Tension," so in my pencil version, there was a "T" on his chest and the copy at bottom said Captain Tension. As I was inking it, however, I decided to change the name of the character to "Captain Neck Rub," but forgot to change the letter on his chest. I turn in my black and white cartoons on Monday and they get sent through the system and mailed out to all the client papers. I don't send the color versions in until the subsequent Friday and by that time, I had noticed my error and changed it.

Mystery solved, Bizarro officianados. Sleep well.

Jilted Lover

(Click pic to big it)
There are some fun images on this site, this one is my favorite by far.

Aliens' Life Form

Bizarro is brought to you today by Big Orange Jumpsuits. "They're free, they're mandatory, you'll wear it and like it!"

I got an email last week from someone who really loved this cartoon. She said she laughed and laughed. Common wisdom in the newspaper world is that for every letter you get, there are x number of other people who feel the same way. I'm going to pretend that number is 6 billion. That means that virtually every person on the planet thought this cartoon was funny as hell. That's a good feeling, my friends.

Does anyone out there know at what point Americans began describing all UFO drivers as looking like this guy at left? I'm guessing there was some pop culture event that depicted them this way and it caught on. The first time I ever saw this face was on this book cover, so perhaps that was it. Or, maybe the ones that began visiting in the mid-to-late 20th century actually looked like this and the notion came from truth.

What if extraterrestrials of sufficient intelligence to travel light years across the universe really did visit out planet and turned out to be one inch tall and no stronger than a cockroach? (Do we have any good reason for assuming they would be about our size?) Would we still respect them? Would our government show them around the White House and serve tiny plates to them at a state dinner?

Or would we dominate and breed them, cook and eat them, grind them up to make aphrodisiacs, keep them as pets? If, on the other hand, each creature turned out to be the size of the moon, perhaps we'd be dinner. It would be interesting to see how fundamentalists would explain this.

Luckily, as we know from the ones hiding among us, they are about our size and mean us no harm.

Drug Talk

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Maskital.

I like this cartoon for what it says about pharmaceuticals and western medicine. I'm not against all prescription drugs, I take a crazy pill to keep me level (antidepressant) and in spite of my several attempts to switch to natural alternatives and live without it, I've had to resign myself to the synthetic.

But the biggest downfall of western medicine is that it tends to treat symptoms more than root causes. This reflects human nature in general, of course – most people would rather take drugs to deal with their cholesterol than change their diet and get some exercise. (One of the popular cholesterol-reducing drugs says on their ads: "When diet and exercise aren't enough." That would account for such a small fraction of the public that I can't help but believe the slogan is there just to give people the excuse to take the drug instead of changing their diet.) Same with erectile dsyfunction, diabetes, heart disease etc. In fact, tens of thousands of Americans each year opt for heart surgery over changing their lifestyle. Wow.

I've said many times here before, veganism (as opposed to vegetarianism) cures so many of these ills that if everyone ate that way it would put big pharm nearly out of business. But to suggest such a radical, "fringe" diet to the public would be absurd! It's much less extreme to ask people to fill their bodies with chemicals than with plants. Makes perfect sense.

As for myself, I try my best to keep the root causes at bay and take as few drugs as possible. I haven't taken an antibiotic for more than ten years, I think, and the only Rx I've taken in that amount of time has been my crazy pills. Part of that is luck, of course, but a lot is lifestyle. Still, I'm not immune to the concept of masking the symptom rather than attacking the cause. I suffer from allergies and opt to take over-the-counter drugs rather than clear the city of the offending plants, for instance. I also suffer from an occasional lack of whooziness, so I sniff glue. But it's prescription glue, so it's totally safe.

Note to readers, especially kids: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SAFE GLUE TO SNIFF. DO NOT SNIFF GLUE. SNIFFING GLUE WITH KILL YOU. WHAT YOU SAW ABOVE WAS HUMOR BY A PROFESSIONAL HUMORIST. DO NOT ATTEMPT WITHOUT CONSULTING YOUR PHYSICIAN.

COLORmation?

This is something I happened upon accidentally which is among the strangest things I've ever seen. It is reportedly from the 1960s (except for the "Something Weird" bumpers) and is amazing in both look and content. I love the blatant sexism and the way Captain Scott hops around like a monkey. The process was apparently called "colormation," which is amusing for obvious reasons.

If the video posted here doesn't work, try this link.

New This Week: October 22, 2008

Been a while since I've done one of these...

If I'm recalling correctly, this is the first time that Secret Invasion and Final Crisis have gone head-to-head, coming out on the same day. But for real fun super-hero comic excitement, I'd put my money on Marvel Adventures Super Heroes #4 by Paul Tobin & Alvin Lee--check out the preview here.

Your other best bet this week is the fifth issue of Kevin Huizenga's Or Else, because by my measure Huizenga's combination of innovation and entertainment places him near the top of today's cartoonists.

Other comics of interest this week include:

The latest in Warren Ellis's Apparat line, Aetheric Mechanics.

The re-issued trade collection of Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright.

The seventh issue of Terry Moore's Echo, which I'm enjoying despite its often leisurely pace.


As usual, the full listing of what's due in stores tomorrow can be found on the Comic List Website.

Boot Quaking

Bizarro is made possible today by Fox News Channel's in-depth expose´, "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Race for the White House: Obama the Terrorist-Loving Socialist Baby Killer."

There is no doubt that Fox News Channel is a blight on the country. If it was even remotely disguised as honest journalism with a conservative slant it would be different, but it is quite simply half-truths and complete lies sold as the only "real truth," followed by more complete lies to back up utterly scripted opinions favoring the rich and powerful. It is, in a very real sense, an opiate for the masses, keeping them in line behind the Murdochs, Bushes, and Exxons of the world.

But what can we do about it in a free society? Not much. To shut them down for misleading the country would violate our freedom of speech, which all of us hold dear. But allowing them to perpetuate ignorance, bigotry and jingoism erodes all of our rights and the constitution itself. It's a catch-22 with no end in sight.

On the bright side, judging by the polls and the unprecedented number of people who have donated small amounts to Obama's campaign, I'm tempted to think that most Americans really are smart enough to finally rise up and do something about this trend toward the abyss. Perhaps we really are about to see average people band together and defeat the corporate old-boy network that runs the world. Perhaps on November 4, more people than anyone could have predicted will turn out to vote and McCain will be buried under a landslide of discontent and things will begin to turn around.

Or perhaps the Fox-News-Channel generation of low-info voters will do the same (with the aid of Diebold Republican Voting Machines and crooked precinct captains) and defeat the best chance this country will likely ever have at saving itself from the precipice on which we teter, and all will be lost.

I continue to quake in my boots.