Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Woodland Creatures.I submitted this cartoon many weeks ago, long before the Somali pirate story hit the news, but the cartoon appeared in papers a day or so after the story was making headlines. Some readers wondered why I was tying the banking crisis and the hostage situation together.
A reader wrote to me recently and suggested a good caption for this cartoon would have been "pirates are giving pirates a bad name." I chuckled and told him I would have used it if I were an editorial cartoonist and could get a cartoon into the paper the day after I drew it. As it is, there is a six week delay between my turning in a cartoon and its appearance in papers, so I can't be that current.
That delay makes it a little nerve wracking if I do a cartoon about an earthquake or a plane crash. More than one syndicated cartoonist has erroneously been accused of making fun of a tragedy the day after it happened. I've been the victim of this kind of coincidence a couple of times in my career, the most ludicrous of which was once when I drew a cartoon about a bicycle pizza delivery guy standing at the Pearly Gates with a pair of twisted handlebars in his hand. St. Pete says something like, "Sorry about that bus, but I was really craving a pizza."
The day after it appeared in papers, I got some angry letters from people in a certain city who thought I was making fun of a prominent cyclist in their community who had been killed by a car the day before my cartoon printed.
Whaddyagonnado?
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