Super Suits

(To make this cartoon a big, honkin', whopper that you can see up close, click the image.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Big Blue Building Bumpers.

A reader (can't remember who now) suggested something about dinosaurs in spaceships or something (can't remember what now) and I ended up with this cartoon. The funnest part of this drawing by far was rendering the dinos in spacesuits. Even though the big one wouldn't actually fit inside that saucer, I took some artistic license because I wanted to use a saucer similar to the one I use for my little alien icon.

Today was my last day in Indy and I'm heading home tomorrow morning. My performance today went very well: nice-sized crowd in spite of the arctic weather, I did a good show in spite of my 130 degree temperature/snotty nose/sneezing/convulsions/halucinations/numb extremities (I came down with some dreaded Midwestern cold on Friday night and have suffered greatly), and all the books that the museum gift shop ordered were sold.

Here are a few more highlights from my week here.

The museum brought in three other guys for the Saturday panel on Native Americans in comics. One of them was a comic book cartoonist named Steve Sanderson, a Cree Indian from Vancouver Island. As you can tell from this picture, at 7 feet tall, Steve is a few inches taller than I am at 6', 6".

The other two guys were comics writer, John Ostrander, and
Michael Sheyahshe, a Caddo indian and writer of a book about Native Americans in the comics. They were all great guys with plenty of interesting things to say about comics and they all went out for Karaoke Saturday night and had a big damn time. I was too ill to join them, unfortunately, so I stayed in my hotel room and blew my nose until I fell asleep.

One of the faithful readers of this blog made a special trip in her speedboat down to the museum midweek and visited with me for a bit. I was most impressed with her parallel parking skills. Thanks for dropping by, Heather.

Just when I thought no more fun could be had in Indianapolis, the program director of the museum and person responsible for dragging...er...bringing me out here, Pete Brown, took us all to the Children's Museum where they were having a comics show. At the show, I saw this children's Superman suit from the early 1960s. This is especially meaningful to me because I HAD THIS SAME SUIT when I was three or four years old! I wore it around the house and yard, tried to fly, blocked bullets and trains with my chest, the whole shebang. Unlike the sissy-children of today, back then you had to provide your own muscles. I don't know what happened to my suit but this is the first time I've seen one since I gave mine up at the age of 14.

My medical alarm just went off which means my heart has stopped beating again, so I'll sign off now before the paramedics arrive. Wish me luck.

Monkey Covers

Sunday is Monkey Covers day here at YACB. Because there's nothing better than a comic with a monkey on the cover!

Everybody's going ape on the cover of Richie Rich & Jackie Jokers #19 (1975).

(Standard disclaimer about King Kong-wannabe apes not really being monkeys applies.)


Image courtesy of the GCD. Click on the image for a larger version.

Revised Evil

In the previous post, I recounted some of my adventures in Indianapolis this week, including a trip to a school. I included a picture of myself with the kids and claimed that nobody noticed I was "roaring drunk." This earned me a trip to the principal's office.

Yesterday I received an email from a school official thanking me politely for coming to the school and telling me everyone enjoyed it, but asking if I would take the picture off the blog. Apparently, school officials and parents could come down hard on the school for allowing their kid's pics on the web, especially in association with a reference to drinking. Here is the revised photo, with the student's faces blurred like criminals, which I supplanted the old one with in the post below, along with a humorous legal disclaimer (in red).Perhaps there are good reasons to be worried about a thing like this, but for the life of me I can't think what they would be. I know pedophiles have met kids online, but that doesn't pertain to this. I know celebs protect the images of their children to make it more difficult for would-be kidnappers, but that's certainly not an issue here. People in witness protection don't want pics on the web identifying their location, I suppose one or more of these kids could be from a family like that.

Mostly, I think it's just goofy paranoia. Fear of the unknown. I've met people before who don't want a photo of them with me to appear on my blog and it always reminds me a bit of primitives being afraid to have their picture taken for fear they will lose their soul.

I do want to emphasize that the faculty at the school was great, very appreciative and cool, and that the person who wrote to me was not being unreasonable. That person is only trying to protect his/her school from a doody storm from less reasonable factions.

And now my own disclaimer: Maybe there is some perfectly logical, obvious reason for objecting to a picture like this on my blog and I'm just not seeing it. If so, I apologize for the sarcasm.