Hair, Dating, Death

Bizarro is brought to you today by the 11th Commandment.

I'm back from my vacation and gosh darn it's good to see you. If I discover any cool pics from my trip, I'll be sure to post them. Just went to Florida to hang out with CHNW's dad, though, so it was pretty chill. It's really rare that I can sit around for a few days and do nothing.

I have a business trip out west next week, so I'm really slammed with deadlines. In addition to my regular unrelenting 7-cartoons-a-week schedule, I've got to do a book cover for my upcoming "Bizarro Heroes" book, which will be full of cartoons about super heroes and caped crime fighters of all kinds. I'm also supposed to do a promotional cartoon for a charity thing that King Features is doing and a couple of other things I can't recall right now. Guess I should have been writing these things down.

To some people, the life of a syndicated cartoonist may seem glamorous and fun, and it certainly can be, but I regularly work 7 days a week, at least 8 hours a day. It wears on me, just like any other job would. And no matter how stressed or tired I am, I have to come up with enough funny ideas to fill every day of my life until I retire. Just typing that sentence made my stomach hurt.

This cartoon about the couple arose recently when I found out about "speed dating." It's a real deal that people do, look it up. It makes sense in an odd, unnatural way, because all relationships play out to an end at some point, some sooner than later. Might as well get it over with, I suppose. What I've done here is to compress what usually takes a year or more into four sentences. If you can get a relationship past numbers one and two and still find some joy in it, you can avoid number four. Sometimes.

This old cartoon from my archives is one that has seriously dated itself. When I drew it, in 1996, people still carried "beepers." (More accurately called "pagers.") People under a certain age won't even know what those were. I thought I'd be happy to see them go because the beeping was an annoyance, but the electronic-super-fly-disco ringtones of today are even worse in my opinion.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer today. I'm overwhelmed with re-entry. Ugh.