Bizarro is brought to you today by a 20% Chance of Snow Flurries.
What better day to talk about April 1, 1997 than January 8, 2011? Mankind may never know, so let's talk about it today.
Somebody in the National Cartoonists Society decided back in late '96 that it would be fun to get all the syndicated cartoonists to switch strips on April Fool's Day, '97 and not tell anyone, as a joke on readers everywhere. Not all of the artists cooperated, of course, but plenty did and the funny pages everywhere were full of comics drawn by the wrong person that day. You can imagine the laughter, knee slapping, and dumbfounded drooling that ensued all across North America. (Neither can I, but play along.) The way it worked is that each participating artist was assigned another feature to draw and their own feature was assigned to someone else. None of these were direct swaps.
Here are the two results I was involved in (click the pics for a larger view.) I was asked to draw Greg Evan's strip, "Luann," and Bill Griffith of "Zippy" was asked to draw Bizarro. If you're interested in seeing more of these legendary swaps, go here: April Fools Cartoons 1997.
Next, Let's talk about last Sunday's wide-screen, technicolor, panoramic Bizarro comic. Because I'm a semi-public figure, I am connected to a lot of people on Facebook. So I get about eleventy dozen requests a day to sign onto some kind of cause or page that aims to end a crisis or petition to ask someone to stop doing something or start doing something or think about what they're doing. It's mind boggling. And my mind already has a tendency toward bogglation. I could be wrong but I can't imagine a Facebook page ever solved anything other than getting Betty White to host SNL. So this cartoon is the result of the boggling caused by the godzillian FB requests I get everyday. You can't fight Zombies with Facebook: words to live by.
(again, click the cartoon below for a view that achieves largerness)
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