Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Singing Monks.Okay, I admit I don't know anything about Zen Buddhism, but the whole "nothingness" thing is a common conception and cartoons are often built on these, whether correct or not.
Like the Moses cartoon from a couple of days ago; several readers left comments on the inaccuracies of my drawing – from the error of having the burning bush and the ten commandments in the same picture to the fact that Moses is wearing shoes on "hallowed ground." I also got a few emails of this sort.
Being neither a Zen Buddhist nor a believer in the historical accuracy of the Bible, I admit that I don't get very nitpicky about these things. I just draw the cartoon in a way that everyone can understand and move on to the next crushing deadline. I don't mind the corrections, by the way. I'm kind of a trivia buff anyway, so I always enjoy a few more tidbits of knowledge.
In spite of this flippant attitude toward history, I actually do try to be more accurate in my cartoons than do most cartoonists. I research historical costumes and such, to get things mostly right, and often look up what certain objects look like to add that extra bit of convincing detail, even though I'm perfectly capable of an approximation out of my own head. But if the accuracy conflicts with the joke, as it would have in the Moses cartoon, I toss it out and use the common misconception instead. Moses talking to a burning bush is immediately understood; Moses talking to a blinding beam of light would have been widely misconstrued to be a scene from Star Trek.
Of the handful of "Zen" cartoons I've done over the years, here is one of my favorites:
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