Test Your I.Q.'s Buoyancy

Bizarro is brought to you today by Cat Porn.

This gag left a few readers wondering. It's a fairly odd idea and I'm not surprised it did not ring a bell with some folks.

It's a joke about stupid criminals. I saw a car with a canoe strapped to the roof one day and thought that if it was parked by a lake and some idiots decided to steal it but use the canoe to get away down the river instead of the car down the roads, they might flip it over and attempt to float it. Which would not work, of course. Then again, they'd never be able to flip the car over in the first place, so what we probably have here is just a stupid cartoon.

I've been doing cartoons 7 days a week for nearly 25 years and no matter how hard you try, you're just not going to create a refrigerator-worthy classic every day. In all modesty, I still think I've got a better batting average than most of the stuff in the paper, so I'm not going to be too hard on myself.

I you would like to know firsthand what it is like to be me, follow these three simple steps:

1. Come up with a reasonably original idea and scribble it down in cartoon form
2. Do that 9,125 days in a row
3. Write about it in a blog

Until tomorrow, my your world be full of unicorns and sexy foot massages...

Crazy Catless

Bizarro is brought to you today by This.

I just got back from Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary last night and was dead tired. I took a two-hour nap when I got home, then slept another 9 hours last night. Lordy.

I rode my motorbike up there and back (1971 BMW R75/5) and took the back roads instead of the big highway. What is normally a 2 1/2 hour journey took me 4 1/2 hours each way. Fun, but very tiring. Still, what a great time we had.

I'm behind on everything now, so no time to make a whole jazztown-hootenanny-blogspree right now. Got to catch up on a deadline and tons of email.

I like this Crazy Cat Lady cartoon because I know a few of them. It occurred to me that they'd be just as crazy without the cats.

Peace, love, and rainbows my friends...(tune in tomorrow for UNICORNS!)

Half Funny

Today's Bizarro is brought to you from Woodstock, NY.

I'm spending the weekend at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary with some friends. Such a great time is being had by all. We didn't plan it this way, but this weekend is a big celebration of some anniversary of the famous hippie-fest in the late 60s. Tons of ex-hippies, old hippies, young retro hippie wanna-bes, and average tourists are wandering the streets. We mostly just stay out at the farm, which is not close enough to the town to be affected by the festivities.

Last night they had a dandy fireworks show over the cemetery at the edge of town. For a small town, it was quite elaborate. Half the fun was watching the fireworks, the other half was watching how the fireworks affected everyone's drugs.

Got to get back to farm chores. Chopping wood, sweating, moving said chopped wood to the wood pile, sweating, feeding and cleaning up after animals, sweating again. It is hot today.

Planetary Possibilities

(Hankerin' for a bigger picture? Touch the Earth with your clicker deal.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Founding Robots.

When I wrote and drew this gag, I was thinking of the guy calling his wife at home on Earth. But when I formatted it for the web just now, it occurred to me that a person may well think he's just calling back to the module. For that matter, the astronaut could be a woman and "Honey" could be her husband. Or she could be a lesbian and "Honey" is her wife. Or a gay astronaut and "Honey" is his husband. Or an animatron of Richard Nixon from DisneyWorld's Hall of Presidents and "Honey" is James K. Polk.

So many possibilities in the world of comics.

Amazon Top 50

Here are the Top 50 Graphic Novels on Amazon this afternoon. All the previous caveats apply.


1 (-). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days *
2 (+23). The Walking Dead, Vol. 10: What We Become
3 (+3). Mercy Thompson Homecoming *
4 (-2). Watchmen
5 (+6). Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
6 (-2). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
7 (+2). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
8 (-5). Asterios Polyp
9 (+4). The Complete Persepolis
10 (-5). Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Deluxe Edition
11 (+13). Fables Vol. 12: The Dark Ages *
12 (+9). Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
13 (-5). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
14 (-7). Diary of a Wimpy Kid
15 (+1). Maximum Ride, Vol. 1 Manga (kindle)
16 (-1). Parker: The Hunter
17 (-3). Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
18 (+5). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
19 (-9). Batman: The Killing Joke
20 (-8). Tumor Chapter 1 (kindle)
21 (+10). Time of Your Life (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Vol. 4)
22 (-3). Final Crisis
23 (+3). Angel: After the Fall, Vol. 4
24 (+8). Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War, Vol. 1
25 (R). Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War, Vol. 2
26 (+7). Batman: Arkham Asylum (15th Anniversary Edition)
27 (-10). Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation
28 (-10). V for Vendetta
29 (-1). Batman: Year One
30 (+7). Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns
31 (N). Pax Romana *
32 (R). The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
33 (-4). American Born Chinese
34 (R). The Walking Dead, Book 1
35 (-8). Mouse Guard Volume 2: Winter 1152
36 (R). The Complete Peanuts 1971-1974 Box Set *
37 (R). The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics
38 (+7). The Long Way Home (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Vol. 1)
39 (+3). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
40 (-5). Green Lantern: Rebirth
41 (R). Stephen King's Dark Tower: Treachery
42 (+4). Wolves at the Gate (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 3)
43 (-13). The Boys, Vol. 4
44 (N). The Walking Dead, Book 3
45 (N). The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974 *
46 (-2). Bone: One Volume Edition
47 (R). The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House
48 (R). No Future For You (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 2)
49 (N). Classic G.I. Joe Volume 3


Items with asterisks (*) are pre-order items.

N = New listing appearing on list for first time
R = Item returning to the list after having been off for 1 or more weeks


Commentary:

* Huge movement for The Walking Dead, possibly tied to the announcement that's it's being developed as a television series for AMC.

* Highest debut goes to Jonathan Hickman's Pax Romana. For a collection by a non-name (though very talented) creator and not featuring an established character or franchise, this is quite impressive.

* We may be beginning to see the start of a university effect, where GNs that are assigned as reading in college classes take a bump up at the start of the semester. This would affect books like Maus, Persepolis, Understanding Comics, and Watchmen. Stay tuned over the next few weeks to see if this holds true.

* Is Green Lantern DC's new Batman?

* A GI Joe volume squeaks in at #49, showing that just because you have the top movie in the country doesn't mean that it will translate to big comics sales.

* I added in the 'R' code to differentiate items which are returning to the list, as opposed to items which are appearing on the list for the first time.

Comedy and Tragedy

This makes me laugh and cry simultaneously.

Zombie Therapy

Bizarro is brought to you today by Fashion Police.

Monsters who feel remorse for their behavior is a regular theme in vampire dramas – HBO's "True Blood," the film, "Twilight" – so I thought it might be fun to extend the same feelings to a zombie. He eats people's brains, then feels bad about it. If only Karl Rove were capable of such emotion.

A libertarian reader told me recently that he believed government should stay out of our way because most people are basically good and will do the right thing without government intervention. He called my view that humans cannot be trusted, "cynical."

He's absolutely right, it is cynical. I also happen to think it is realistic and accurate, as witnessed by recent human history. (By "recent," I mean the past 100,000 years.) While most "individuals" might be good, groups of idividuals in power cannot be trusted. Corporations are amoral by definition – their sole purpose for existence is to make money, not serve humanity – and the very small percentage of people who rise to the top of corporations are very often as unethical and unrepentant as a zombie. That's how they get there. Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Dick Cheney, everyone on Wall Street, etc.

People who rise to the top of government usually have the same problem, of course; power almost always corrupts. But the difference is that government is not amoral by definition and in a republic such as ours, the politicians eventually, in some way, must answer to the rest of us. That is to say that if things get out of hand we can fire them, as we did to so many Republicans in the last election. (Of course, people have to be smart enough to figure out they are being screwed, which sometimes takes a while, but that's another story.)

It's not perfect, god knows, but it's better than letting markets police themselves and not screw the rest of us (see Wall Street, last eight years), and corporations not to pollute the planet and sell toxic goods to the rest of us (see last 60 years), and people to treat each other fairly and not seek to destroy those with more skin pigment. (See Civil War, civil rights movement, "birthers," current town hall hooliganism over health care, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Rush, etc.)

Stories about zombies and vampires are popular because they are a metaphor for our actual lives as we struggle to avoid the bloodsuckers and braineaters at the top. What discourages me most is when the monsters find ways to scare their prey into fighting for them, instead of against, as they have done so often in the past decade and most recently with health care reform.

Enough seriousness, now this.