Shoes,Cake,Shoes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Midnight Snacks.

If you've noticed my face beaming this morning it is because I'm really proud of this ant joke. Ants aren't particularly afraid of guns but threaten them with a shoe and they'll do almost anything you ask. The only fictional part of this cartoon is that ants don't have money. I wish they did, because with all the shoes I have I could get rich.

I've written a couple of ant jokes lately, the next one appears in few weeks, and I feel as though there may be more to come. It is because ants have been on my mind. I wish there were some clever or humorous reason for this – if there were I would share it with you now and you might smile or chuckle – but no such reason exists. I've just been thinking about ants. And easy ways to get money in a make-believe world.

Quite a few readers wrote to me asking what this cat joke was about, and it is always safe to assume that for every person who takes the time to ask a question, there are 147,326 more with the same question who couldn't be bothered to write. If you're one of these people, call my What Did That Cat Gag In Bizarro Mean? Hotline at 1-800-WTF? Or, just count the number of times the cat says, "die" and then remember the myth about cats having nine lives.

As is my custom, here now is an ancient cartoon from the same canister in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. This one is about the god-awful shape of Birkenstock sandals, which hippie types used to wear with socks. Maybe some still do. Regardless, I published this insensitive satire of the famous footwear in 1996 and soon after received a correspondence from the office of the inventor of Birkenstocks. It seems he liked the gag and wanted the original art. I love it when that happens. I wrapped it in a sock and mailed it forthwith.

Here's a little behind-the-scenes trivia about this cartoon: check out the email address I posted at the bottom of it. I was among the first few cartoonists putting email addresses in my cartoons and I was so new at it that I wasn't sure people would even recognize it as an email address so I put "email:" above it. What a dork. Also, I was one of the very first people to have a non-number email address with Compuserve. In those days, all the Compuserve addresses were long, impossible-to-remember numbers and as AOL became popular with clever letter-based email addresses, Compuserve customers began to complain. So they decided to try out a few new word-based addresses and were nice enough to give me one of them. At the time, it passed for cool.

Have a lovely weekend or least a Birkenstock weekend. That is to say, comfy but not lovely.


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