Friday Night Fights: Rally Vincent vs. Dudes in a Van

From Gunsmith Cats Burst vol. 1 (2007). Story & Art by Kenichi Sonoda. (click pic for larger)

A classic? Blam! Blam! Blam!

The Comics I'm Most Looking Forward to This Summer

Final Crisis? Secret Invasion? Heck no.

The comic I'm most looking forward to this summer is the King-Size Spider-Man Summer Special, by the Banana Sunday team of Paul Tobin & Colleen Coover. The story will feature May Jane Watson and a host of Marvel Women—including Marvel Girl, Clea, She-Hulk, Enchantress, Scarlet Witch, Patsy Walker, and Millie the Model—all drawn by YACB fave artist Colleen Coover!

Jennifer M. Contino has an interview with Tobin about the comic over at Newsarama The Pulse.

Circle August 6 on your calendars, and let your Friendly Local Comic Shop owner know that you want the bestest comic of the summer!*

(*I should note that All Star Superman #12 is also scheduled to come out on August 6, which would easily make that day one of the Best New Comic Days Ever—but seriously, what's the chance of All Star Superman #12 actually coming out on that day?)

EDIT: The Tobin interview, as you no doubt figured out when clicking the link, is at The Pulse, not Newsarama. Apologies to JenC and the fine folks at Comicon.Com. I got confused because Newsarama has this fine interview with Coover about the same project which I also meant to link to.

Cat Love

(Click on image to enlargenate)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Survivors of Abusive Cats.

I've lived with both cats and dogs and appreciate both for very different reasons. Dogs love you unconditionally, while cats seem to tolerate you as long as you let them have their way. I have often wondered if one of my cats has homicidal fantasies about me. It's just something about the way she looks at me.

For those of you who don't have Bizarro in your Sunday paper (email the paper and DEMAND it!) or it is published in a format that doesn't include the larger title panel, here it is.

UNinquisitive Inquisition

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by the Kansas Board of Education.

Cartoonists have long explored various renditions of the "fish walking out of the sea" and other evolution motifs, and I'm no exception. There is just so much you can do and say with this subject.

I'm not entirely sure what this one is saying, but I think it might be about how some people can't believe we evolved from single-cell organisms because they are trying to see the entire picture at once. They imagine a fish got legs one morning, walked out of the ocean, bought a suit, and showed up at the office that afternoon.

Richard Dawkins uses a good metaphor in his book, "The God Delusion," saying that if you stood at the bottom of a huge, sheer cliff, you could not imagine how a person could possibly get up to the top without help. But if you go around the other side and walk up the slow incline to the top, it's quite easy. (If I've got the wrong book here, somebody let me know.)

Evolution vs. Creationism is sort of a favorite subject of mine, both in Bizarro and in my personal life. I love documentaries about the subject and have read a number of books about it, both scientific and political. I believe in being polite and diplomatic, but I admit I find it very difficult not to be condescending to supposedly well-educated people who believe in creationism in the face of so much evidence of the relative accuracy of Darwin's theory. It's as though they were born a thousand years too late.

War on Grammar

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by the Straight Talk Express.

The day this cartoon ran, I got a couple of letters from soldiers who were angry that I was making fun of our troops. I politely explained that I was not making fun of the troops or anyone else, but rather pointing my satire at the Bush administration, who began and continue this war because of oil.

One wrote back to me and claimed it is not Bush, but Al Gore and the environmentalists who are responsible for the high price of gas. At least that's what I think his nearly random arrangement of letters and punctuation was trying to convey. (not all right-wingers are illiterate, of course, but this poor fellow is damn close.)

I explained to him that Bush, Cheney, and their hoard are oil men and that they and their cronies are making billions off the current crisis. I asked him to Google "oil company profits." He wrote back and said that he had, and found nothing.

I'm guessing Google had as much trouble interpreting his scattershot English as I did.