Food?

(click the lettuce to make the image bigger)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Suspicious "Food"

Today's offering, which ran in papers last Sunday, is a Jack and the Beanstalk spin off. Magic beans aren't always a good thing; who needs a four ton head of lettuce in their yard? Imagine the size of the bunnies it would attract.

Drawing the lettuce reminded me a lot of my days as a commercial illustrator. I worked for many years in a small commercial art studio in Dallas and we specialized in line drawings of products, mostly food. Some of our regular clients were Frito Lay, Armour Meats, Pepsi and American Airlines. AA had us draw planes, of course, not food. It was not glamorous work but it was good, consistent money in those days.

Most of what we did was photorealistic stipple drawings like the image I've posted here. This was not for a client but was a promotional image we did for the studio, which was called "Cat Pak." Get it? It's food in the shape of a cat. I wasn't vegan then, so drawing a dead fish as food did not conflict with my personal ethics. This is a bad copy of the original but was the best I could find today. The original was not so "gloppy" looking. Gloppy is an advertising term used to describe things that are, I don't know, gloppy-looking.

In the first ten years of Bizarro, from 1985 to 1995, the feature didn't make enough money to support my family so I worked full time as an illustrator and did all my cartooning at nights and on weekends. It was a grind.