Angel Horse English

Bizarro is brought to you today by Great Abs.

After more than 25 years as a daily cartoonist and over 9000 published cartoons, I find that I sometimes copy myself. This angel cartoon is one such occasion. When I wrote it a few weeks ago, I thought it was completely original, but a few days after it was submitted I was digging through old archives, gathering super hero cartoons for my next book, and saw an old Bizarro with the identical concept. If I'd thought to write down the date, I could have shown it to you here.

Instead, I'll have to use what I call "language" to describe it: A couple of angels in Heaven are looking at another angel who is upside-down, his head and shoulders buried in the clouds. His halo is above his feet, his robe is falling down, but not far enough to expose his underpants (which would be considered pornographic by daily funny pages standards.) One of the two onlookers says, "In life, he was a performance artist."

I was shocked to find that I had ripped myself off so closely without even knowing it; thank god it was one of my own gags and not someone else's. I've done that on a couple of occasions, too, and felt like a quantity of feces.

And now a horse-in-a-bar joke. This is one of those weird cartoons that doesn't relate much to real life, but to me, much of the humor is in the look on the horse's face. I put a lot of effort into getting just the right attitude and expression on my characters, I hope you, the reader, notice and appreciate that. Some do, some don't, that's the way the cartoon cookie crumbles.

I got out of the habit of posting older cartoons for a while, but I enjoy it and so do many readers (perhaps you are one of those?) so I'm back to it today. I've always enjoyed this take on the cliche of the guy whose wife doesn't understand him. In fact, this guy could have been me.

When I was 20, I traveled through Europe with a backpack and a train pass and while in Milan, I met a beautiful Romanian woman who was a few years older than I. We spent many weekends visiting museums and parks together and I developed a huge crush on her and would have been stupid enough to marry her and take her back home with me if she'd been willing. Thankfully she wasn't. She spoke five or six languages fluently, but English was not one of them. We communicated by means of a bizarre combination of the hundred-or-so English words she knew and the hundred-or-so Italian words in my vocabulary. The rest was pantomime and pictographs. It was terribly romantic but I can only imagine what calamity would have ensued if she'd come back to the U.S. with me, learned English, and we had found out what each other were really like.

I dodged that bullet, but caught many others throughout my foolish, youthful romantic escapades. But how many of us escape life without a few romantic bullet wounds? As somebody once said: Better to have loved and to have been ripped apart over and over again by the machine gun of ill-advised sexual choices than to have never loved at all. Amen, brother.