Quintuple Tragedy

(click the pic to make it big)

Bizarro is brought to you today by A Leisurely Drive.

Hey, I went to a holiday party last night and they had a very fun live band. But it turned out that was not the most exciting part of the evening.

Nor was the most exciting part when we left the place at midnight, hailed a cab out front of our friends' building, and my formerly lovely wife, Ashley, stuck her head into the passenger-side door window and said to the driver, "Will you take us to Brooklyn?"

The most exciting part was when the cabbie suddenly stepped on the gas (fear of Brooklyn? involuntary leg spasm?), throwing my formerly lovely wife to the street, conking her head on the pavement and knocking her unconscious.

Not being a trained crime fighter, instead of drawing my gun and shooting at the cab or simply getting the car's number, I fell to my knees and began shouting to her, asking if she was okay. She was not okay, as her bloodied and sleeping face quickly told me.

I called 911, they came quickly, tossed us into an ambulance and brought us to an emergency room at the other end of the bumpiest street in the tri-state area. With what it costs to ride in an ambulance, you'd assume that included some sort of suspension system, but you'd be wrong.

Upon entering the ER, the first thing I learned was that all of the employees are superstitious. They forced me to put my camera phone away, presumably fearing I would steal their souls. I told them I had all I could handle with my own soul and had no interest in theirs, but that reassurance seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Now in the trauma room, at first there was a lot of clothes-cutting, shouting of inane questions to get a brief test of Ashley's I.Q. –– What's your name? What day is this? Do you realize we're ruining your fancy party clothes by cutting them off because it is so much more dramatic than removing them the normal way? –– and bandying-about of medical terms like "stat", "cc", "saline," and, "Sir, put that camera away, we're not going to ask again!"

One interesting thing I found out was that you don't really have to leave the trauma room if you don't want to. I learned this after they asked me several times, rather sternly, to step outside and I simply said, "no." Instead of calling security or producing a taser, they just sort of looked disappointed and went on about their business. In their defense, however, they were being forced to ask me and this caused them fear; "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wait outside," they said over and over. "No," I blandly stated each time and this seemed to allay their fears for a few more minutes. I was, after all, standing calmly off to the side, not scrubbing up and offering to help.

After seven hours of poking, prodding, testing, and mostly waiting on gunshot and knifing victims to be treated, they gave her a couple of stitches in her eyebrow where previously there were none and sent us home, warning her to keep her head away from speeding taxis and the pavement until it healed.

They further admonished her not to get the wound wet for 24 hours, which is a real drag because she has quite a lot of dried blood in her hair. I'm sure it will be uncomfortable for her to sleep with dried blood in her hair and I'm not downplaying that at all, but what about me? I have to sleep with a woman with a face like Rocky Balboa and dried blood in her hair. That's not something I thought I'd ever say.

CHNW is a real trooper and was happy to allow me to publish these pics of her and make a humorous post out of this otherwise unfun event.

I would like to offer two bits of advice to you, dear reader:
1. If you are in NYC, do not ask a cab driver if he will take you somewhere. Get in the cab, close the door, and tell him where he is taking you. By law, they have to do it, but if your destination is not as profitable as they'd like, they will often get away before you can get in.
2. Avoid the holidays. You're safer at home where nothing moves quickly enough to knock you down.


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Cuss Bus Pink

Bizarro is brought to you today by Intimacy.

I was at the Ohio State University Festival of Cartoon Art over the weekend and my oh my what a dandy it was. They do this thing every three years, there are only about 250 tickets sold, and the majority of attendees are cartoonists and serious collectors and aficionados. Also in attendance were Matt Groening, Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Roz Chast, Patrick McDonnell, James Sturm, Jen Sorensen, Jan Eliot, Dave Kellett, Tom Gammill, Tony Cochran, and Steve Breen. I'm sure I forgot someone, please forgive me. It was a great honor to be able to tipple with some of my heroes, particularly Groening, Spiegelman, Griffith and Chast – all four are legends of intelligent humor, something that is always in danger of extinction in this reality-show, increasingly lowbrow world.

About this passel of cartoons I've posted today to catch up: "Adult Spelling Bee" is an idea I originally published in the 90s, I think. I came across it in my archives while looking for something else and thought it was a good idea and could be done better with a little tweaking, so I rewrote it a bit and redrew it.

Because I'm compiling cartoons for my super hero collection coming out in the spring, I'm still writing super hero gags. The one about the bus is a fantasy I've had many times. I loathe sitting next to strangers on public transportation, especially talkative ones, and will do almost anything to avoid it. I'm a friendly guy, but I can't stand small talk and think few things are worse than sitting next to a chatty traveler on a long flight.





The Mothman cartoon was a collaboration with my young teenage friend, Victor. It's colored that sickening pink because it was part of a breast cancer awareness project that King Features sponsored. All of King's cartoonists were asked to color their comics pink on Sunday, October 10. They asked me to do the poster for it. I'm not a fan of cancer research and don't like supporting it monetarily because a lot of that money goes toward torturing lab animals. If humans ate vegan diets there would be substantially less cancer, but rather than inconvenience ourselves or stop doing something we enjoy, we torture and kill millions of innocent beings every year in an attempt to find ways to survive eating the wrong foods. In spite of my objections, I participated in this project because it doesn't give money to the cause directly, but mostly reminds people to get screenings so they can catch it early. Just my take on it, whatever.

Thanks to Victor for his help on Mothman, I may recolor it for the book. The pink kind of turns my stomach.

Music, Animals, Lawn

This past Saturday evening was our Sean Lennon concert at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. It was "far out," as the kids say.

Sean's band is called The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and consists of him and his lady friend, Charlotte Kemp Muhl. Sean plays guitar and sings, Charlotte plays just about everything else in the world and sings, too. The surprising thing is that in spite of being a gorgeous model, she's actually really good. Guitar, bass, accordion, dingy dongy bell thing, and banjo, she adds to each song like a pro. And her voice is nice, too. Even more surprising is that Sean started teaching her to play music just two years ago.

The two of them were delightful people, not stuck up or diva-ish or snotty or privileged or arrogant or hairy like warthogs or gooey like those toys you used to get out of gumball machines that stick to the wall when you throw them, then slowly crawl downward. They were friendly and smart and cool. Such a pleasure.

The music was great, too. Sean's voice is lovely, occasionally reminiscent of his father's – which has a heartbreaking quality that is unavoidable to those of us who enjoyed his music during his lifetime – but is overall his own, and his songs are melodic with the kind of clever turn-of-phrase lyrics I've always associated with the name "Lennon." TGSTT has an acoustic album coming out in the fall, I'll be pimping it on this blog. If it's as nice as what I heard on the lawn at the sanctuary this weekend, it'll be worth pointing at your ears.

Afterward, in the farmhouse, I found out that Sean is a big fan of cartoons and a very talented artist himself. He and Charlotte do all the graphics for the band themselves and Sean does a fair amount of freehand drawing that is pretty impressive. He dreamed of being a cartoonist but became a musician, I dreamed of being a musician but became a cartoonist; the perfect basis for party chat.

Next month we're having a Moby concert at the farm, hope some of you local folks can make it.

King Kong Tennis

Bizarro is brought to you today by Larry King.

I like this Larry King Kong joke. The bottom title caption thingy is funny by itself and the humor is further advance by the reference to Skull Island, which is where Kong was captured. Not to be missed is the coffee cup which reads, "Marry Me," since Larry marries a lot of people. So there you have it – three jokes in one. Because I care about you.

Random thoughts of the week:
The USA won a World Cup game in the last minute of the match the other day and unlike my previous experiences with soccer, I found it exciting. In spite of my disparaging comments about soccer (football everywhere except the U.S.) a few days ago, I'm starting to get into the tournament. I still say the melodramatic diving is absurd (every time someone falls in apparent agony because he was tapped on the back I want to introduce him to the hockey player who, during the recent Stanley Cup Playoffs, had seven teeth knocked out by a puck, finished the game, had surgery the next day and played the next night), the officiating is laughable, and it's a bit slow for my taste, but I'm having fun with it. I like to listen to sports while I draw cartoons and look up when the commentator gets excited.

You may have heard that a truly historic tennis match happened at Wimbledon this week. Without going into how tennis is scored, the average match takes around 3 hours and around 50 games are played, often less. This one, between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, lasted 11 hours and five minutes, took three days to complete because it was called for darkness twice, incorporated 183 games and 980 points. That's more games in a single match than some players have to play to get all the way through a tournament and several different opponents to win the trophy for the entire thing. To put it into perspective, it would be like a baseball game that lasted fifty or sixty innings, like a football game that lasted 12 hours, like a soccer match that lasted 9 hours, like an election that lasted 6 weeks (oh, we had one of those), like a dumped lover eating three gallons of Haagen Dazs at one sitting.

Here is what the average score of a tennis set looks like:
Player A: 6 4 4 6 6
Player B: 3 6 6 3 4
Each number represents the number of games it took to win each of five sets. Player A wins the best of five.

Here's what this match looked like:
Isner: 6 3 6 7 70
Mahut: 4 6 7 6 68

How these guys remained standing and playing well is beyond anyone's guess. After the match, Mahut went home and cried a lot, Isner went on to lose his next match (a day later) quickly and mercifully, going home and downing three gallons of Haagen dazs.

Last random thought: We had a dandy time watching our buddy, Rhett Miller, play at the Bowery Hotel bar last night. Here's a pic of me, Rhett, CHNW, and Rich, Rhett's dentist, whom we've become friends with because he shows up at all of Rhett's gigs in NYC. And no, it was not Loud Shirt Night at Bowery Hotel last night, it was just a coincidence.












P.S. Rhett isn't naturally shiny, he had just finished playing and was sweaty. (Mmmmm...rock star sweat...)

Robots, Statues, Music

Bizarro is brought to you today by The Big Ugly.

This was an eventful weekend in my area. The National Cartoonists Society had their annual convention and awards ceremony just across the river from NYC, someplace called Jersey City. I've never been there myself, but I hear it is gorgeous.

I am told I won their biggest award, "Cartoonist of the Year" and am grateful for the honor. (Yes, I was told I was grateful for the honor, and I actually was.) The statue, which I have come to affectionately call "The Big Ugly," was designed in the early 1900s by Rube Goldberg, and is named The Reuben after him. Pictured below the blue link above is the one with Al Jaffee's name on it, from a couple of years ago.

Instead of attending this year's convention, which I've been to almost yearly since 1995, I was at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in upstate NY for a benefit concert given by Chrissie Hynde and JP Jones. It was a phenomenal experience; beautiful scenery, terrific music and good friends in a very intimate setting out on the lawn.













The musicians set up on a deck overlooking a large lawn and played songs from their new album, set to be released in August. I love Hynde's voice and JP Jones' voice blends terrifically well with it. I haven't heard the album, but if it was a good as the set we heard, you'll want to pick it up. By the way, that isn't the head of a cow/giraffe hybrid in the background, that's a costume used at the recent Veggie Pride Parade in NYC a few weeks back.













From behind the musicians you can see what an intimate gathering it was. We were only allowed 250 guests because of local ordinances (any more than that and you have to hire cops and that seriously cramps my party style, dude) but we had many hundreds more inquire about the show. We could easily have sold 500 tickets. The guitarist at left is from Liverpool and an amazing player, I was jealous, wish I could remember his name. Patrick M-something. JP is in the middle. His legs aren't actually 14 inches long, it's just the way it looks in this picture. He's actually completely normal.

Thanks so much to all the people who have been leaving "congrats" messages on my Facebook page and the comments sections of my blog posts, and to all of you who've sent emails. I can't answer them all personally, but they are all read and appreciated.

My editor at King Features and good friend, Brendan Burford, accepted the award for me. He asked me for an acceptance speech to read but I'm not one to write a lot down in those situations, so I gave him this:

"Dan Piraro would have been here tonight except that he was killed this afternoon when he lit a cigar near an open bottle of scotch while having sex with Ashley on his motorcycle. At least he died doing the four things he loved most."

Brendan said it was well received.

Can't Miss This

ENTERTAINMENT ALERT!

If you're in the northeast, come to Woodstock Sanctuary next Saturday, May 29th for a concert on the farm with Chrissie Hynde (of The Pretenders) and Welsh songwriter, JP Jones.

It will be fun and cool and awesome and all the money goes to the sanctuary. I'll be there along with CHNW and my whole posse of closest pals. We can chat and pretend to be friends and in such an intimate setting, you might also get to meet Chrissie, because, let's face it, you always wanted to!

If you do drop by, be sure to introduce yourself and say you read my blog. I'll fawn over you real good!

Tickets and info.

My Comeback Blog

Bizarro is brought to you by my long absence. Thanks for your patience and all of the notes and comments expressing a wish for my return to daily blogging. I've been away from home for three weeks, a rarity for me, partly on holiday in Hawaii and partly in Austin, Texas for my daughter's wedding. It was a terrific trip all around.

I'll post some holiday pics in the coming days or week, if I can get them downloaded and sorted and all that. Just the good/funny/weird ones. I don't want to subject you to boring personal moments or anything.

Speaking of boring personal moments, here are a couple of nice pics of my two daughters and me at the wedding. I'm the dark guy on the right who just got back from two weeks in Hawaii. The one in the light dress is Krapuzar, my eldest and the new bride, the one in the disgraceful, upstage-your-sister-at-her-own-wedding red dress is Krelspeth, the youngest. The "K2" that regularly appears in my cartoons stands for them.

















And here, as proof that I was indeed in Hawaii, is a picture of me underwater at a Maui beach.

By the way, a handful of readers wrote to me asking what the above cartoon meant. If you were similarly confused, if you rearrange the letters in each word of the speaker's balloon, you get "There is no god." Hence the atheist anagram.

More shenanigans tomorrow!

Hawaii? Fine, how are ye?

Bizarro is brought to you today by Hawaii.

Hello, dear reader, it is good to see you. I am back online and blogging again, hopefully daily, after a few days of Internet silence. For the last four days I was in the birthplace of our president, Honolulu, Kenya, (where I did not have easy access to the Internets) and since yesterday have been in Maui. I was brought here by the Hawaiian Vegetarian Society to do a couple of talks – Honolulu on Tuesday night and Maui last night. Great crowds, great folks, a few real freaks (but that's one of the things I love about Maui) and now that the business end of my trip is through, CHNW and I are going to hang out for another week and enjoy the island.

The pic below is our new best friend, having met him in the security line at the airport because he and CHNW are apparently the same sort of people who cannot be near another human without getting to know them. He's around 7 feet tall, is way freakier looking in person than this photo conveys and is quite an amusing character. According to him, he is a Vietnam vet, spends most of his time rumbling around Maui on one of his four Harleys, and his name is Atta(then six or seven more syllables of Hawaiian-sounding stuff that I can't remember.) We hung out with him for a while in the airport, took some pics, and said our goodbyes. Maybe we'll see him around the island.

Until tomorrow, I bid you "Aloha." (Which I think is Hawaiian for "Where da bitches at?" )

Sick and Funny

Bizarro is brought to you today by Showbiz.

Thursday night was the big Comedy for Karma show at Gotham Comedy Club in NYC and it was a big success. According to all reports and reviews, everyone had a great time with the exception of me, and here's why.

A few hours before the show, on Thursday afternoon, I started to come down with a deadly illness of some kind. I felt feverish, nauseous, a little dizzy, achy all over, and weak. Yay! Just how you want to feel when trying to make a roomful of people laugh.

I managed to make it through the show – adrenaline will prop you up on those situations – but by the time I got home that night, I felt like death and passed out like a freshman on Spring Break. About 3 in the morning, the barfing began and I spent the next 24 hours in hell. We all know the feeling. This morning, Saturday, I woke up feeling normal again and I'm keeping my fingers crossed. All in all, about a 40-hour bug.

Here are some shots from the show, my picture from the show is beneath the "Showbiz" link in the first line of this post, and yes, I brought my clothes to the show wadded up in a tiny sack.

Opening the show, Myq Kaplan, a relative newcomer but fast-rising star. Funny, smart, won Best Standup NYC competition last year, has his own Comedy Central special premiering on Apr 30. He's also vegan and has some very smart/funny/not-preachy material about it.

Next, Wyatt Cenac of The Daily Show. Smart, funny, Emmy Award winner, made people laugh openly and without remorse.

Lizz Winstead, creator of The Daily Show and Air America Radio, renowned standup comic, producer, performer extraordinaire. She talked a lot about her dog's habit of eating poop, hilarity ensued.

Gary Gulman, three-time veteran of our show, his Comedy Central special was called "Boyish Man," always a huge hit. Even I was laughing while trying to keep down my lunch.

Dave Atell finished the show in his inimitable, ear-burning style. He's been on every TV network, performed in every comedy club in America, is the quintessential pro, and never has a bad night. Atell killed, as he always does. There were a lot of bodies to clean up, but it was worth it.

Wait a minute! No picture of Louis C.K.? Indeed, he had a business emergency come up and had to cancel at the last minute. Very sad, but I explained to everyone that he's really not very funny and I think that made it better.

NOTE: Many readers have asked that we video tape the show for folks to watch online, but with so many performers, each with their own agents and contractual obligations, it is impossible to get anyone to allow a benefit show like this to be taped, unless it's being broadcast. Except for cartoonists, almost no one will give their work away on a large scale for free. Sorry, gang.

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

So here it is President's Day and Valentine's Day back-to-back. Who can afford all of the presents for both such important holidays, especially in this sluggish economy?!

The solution is to get that special someone (and yourself) a Bizarro iPhone app! Boy, am I excited about it! I've been working for months with some very cool app designers here in NYC and we've come up with a new innovation in the comics-for-phones field!

Previously, with other comics apps, you could only buy a given number of cartoons and cram them into your phone and when you'd seen them all, that was that. Could take you ten minutes, could take you ten years.

With the Bizarro app, a NEW COMIC is added EVERY DAY! (The same comic that appears in newspapers.) PLUS, at any given time there is a YEAR'S ARCHIVE of comics that can be accessed super easy and fast from a handy-dandy calendar page. You can also click to access bio info about me (oh! so funny!), info about Bizarro (more humor!), and a help link if pushing buttons on a phone ends up being more than you can handle. Also, you can shoot an email to your other cool friends who might like this app, and you can leave comments. Last, but not least, you can
click to access this very ever-lovin' blog.

ALL FOR ONLY $1.99 PER YEAR! How can we give all of these laughs, drawings, insights, and life-changing experiences away for only $1.99 per year? I'm not sure, I'll have to ask them about raising the price to something more appropriate, like $10K per week. But for now, the price is DEAD CHEAP, so don't miss it!

As you can see from the graphic below, the home page is super long, so scroll down, amigos!

MAY I READ MORE ABOUT IT NOW?
YES! READ MORE ABOUT IT NOW!





Click it to big it...

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Bizarro is brought to you today by Impatience.

Here is a cartoon about a really big cigarette.

In other news, the weather in NYC was not hideously cold and wet yesterday, so I went for a ride on my motorcycle. My biggest complaint about where I live is that the winters are too cold, too long, and take all of the fun out of this, one of my three favorite activities. (The other two being playing my guitar and making the sexy time with the womens.)

Besides the three mentioned above, another fun thing to do is to open an envelope and find you have somehow received a huge sum of money, tax-free and no strings attached. This has never happened to me, but I can easily imagine the fun that would be associated with it.

Something much less fun – in fact, the opposite of fun – would be to open an envelope and find that you owe a large sum of money and there is no way out of it. That has happened to me on a few occasions and it sucks. In fact, the sucking can be heard for miles around.

I must get back to my inking now. Today I am drawing cartoons for the week of December 7, one of which includes a platypus.

Until my next entry, please enjoy this picture of Jason Trachtenburg, of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, one of my favorite strange stage acts. I took this photo with my phone in NYC on Thursday night. Even though Jason looks like he's walking, he was actually posing. He is a very quirky cat and a new friend of mine.

Florida Vacation Pics

Here, today, for what it's worth (probably very little) is my vacation blog. Whatever.

I took last week off and went to the Gulf coast of Florida with CHNW to hang out with her dad, a terrific guy and also a professional cartoonist. Getting out of town for a 365-day-a-year deadline person like me is very hard. I usually work 6 to 8 hours a day, seven days a week, so to get ahead by a week I have to double that. It's bad.

The first night in Florida I let loose and relaxed with way too much scotch. The pic above was taken at sunset, holding my camera as still and level as I could. It got worse as the evening wore on. I haven't been that drunk in over ten years, I'm happy to report.

The next morning, bleary-eyed and swollen-headed, we drove down to an old beach resort on Captiva Island. Along the way, CHNW discovered that if she held her mouth open in the wind, it would blow her cheeks out and vibrate them. We all laughed and I wished my headache would go away.

CHNW and her dad, Ralph, have been going to Captiva yearly since she was 5 years old. This was their 30th year. One of the things they always do is have dinner at an indescribably weird place called The Bubble Room. Out in the various parking areas, The Bubble Room leaves nothing to chance with plenty of parking signs. From top to bottom: "Any car parking on roadway will be ticketed and towed," "Bubble Room parking," "You must find legal parking," and "Additional parking across the street." If a person visiting The Bubble Room gets towed or ticketed, they should not be let out of the house without a guidance counselor.

Here is a nice shot of Ashley breaking out of the gorilla cage outside The Bubble Room. We feel confident that no one has ever taken a shot like this before.

Inside, one finds an insanely decorated world of hallucination and chaos. The diner is never left wanting for wacky and kooky things to look at. You can see how much fun I'm having in these candid shots.











One good thing to do at a beach resort is to visit the beach, which we did daily.


To answer a question that I get a lot, yes, I do swim with a cigar.











The dapper gentlemen shown here was screaming at me for "swimming topless again." After some clarification, we discovered he had mistaken me for his wife. He said it was the cigar.









In spite of the fact that I am a huge celebrity, I like to look for shells just like a normal person. When I do this, I call myself Captain Beachcomber. The cape is particularly effective if there is a stiff breeze.













Because we were there the week before Halloween, the resort was decorating for a party. We found the bottom of a mummy in the parking lot and used it for these quaint shots, which make us look extremely thin.

This next sequence shows my willingness to share with the dead. (click it to big it)





And what family vacation destination is complete without a naked, bald, beaten and dismembered woman?









Florida is known for its large bugs, which we discovered first hand when attacked outside our cabin by this spider.






















We also happened across some Xmas decorations stored in a carport. Here are two Santas, one with significant saltwater decay and the other completely out of the closet.












Something we came across in town was this interesting graffiti technique of scratching your message into a leaf. These samples were all found on the same tree. Be sure to click the image for a larger view so you can read them. Locals told us that Ryan left town and is fine.

I have more pictures but they are even more boring than the ones featured here, so I'll end now. I hope you enjoyed my vacation blog as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you.





I will leave you with this picture of me and CHNW's dad, Ralph, as I attempt to prove to him that his daughter did not, in fact, marry an effeminate wimp. I think I nearly had him convinced until moments later, when I attempted to jump the marsh on my rented bicycle. This episode ended with me running from a startled egret, screaming like a little girl.