Comedy and Cake

Bizarro is brought to you today by Oprah.

My mysterious e-friend, Derek, has been sending me some fun ideas lately, and here's another one. Though I get pun suggestions from readers daily and turn down the overwhelming majority of them, sometimes there is one that when combined with a fun pic is worthwhile. (In my opinion. Some commentators on this blog will doubtless disagree.)

I also do cartoons for Parade Magazine and I had originally submitted this one to them. They wanted to use it but didn't get back to me quickly enough and I used it for Bizarro instead because of an looming deadline.

It's been a while since I've posted any of my Parade cartoons, so here are a few to point your eyeballs at.

This is as close to an animal rights message as I'll likely ever get into Parade Magazine. And, of course, only a person who is already familiar with the movement would see it as such.

Even when I was still consuming dairy products, I wondered why I found bovine milk acceptable when I knew full well that a glass of dog milk, or even an anonymous human's milk would turn my stomach. Human milk would certainly be better suited to our bodies – designed specifically for it, in fact – but I suspect a rack (pun intended) of commercially packaged human milk from anonymous donors would not sell well in the local grocery store.

I thought this was a fun gag. Unlike most of my work, it is a simple concept without a paragraph or more of dialogue and a tag line at the bottom. Most of the other cartoonists in Parade opt for the borderless image with the spoken line printed in quotes beneath the picture. I still prefer to box it in and letter the captions myself. Maybe I'm just a control freak.






And here is what my Parade cartoons look like in the paper, wedged between "Howard Huge" and an ad about foot fungus or something. As you can see, Parade is one of those magazines that takes the artist's signature off and prints it in the margin instead. I've never cared for that style, but what are you going to do? A person making a living as a cartoonist is luckier than the average lottery winner, so you don't complain about where or how you're being published.

The other half of that equation is that I wouldn't have a career without you, the reader. That may sound corny, but that's only because it is corny. But it's still true. Thanks for reading.

P.S. The links to cake pics that are featured today came from this amazingly amusing blog:
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/