(Kids! Be the first in your local gang to click on the image above and see it BIG!)
Bizarro is brought to you today by Birth of a Nation.
If you wake up enough to crawl over to a window and take a peek out the window, you may notice it's the weekend. That can mean only one thing on this blog – a Sunday comic post. But wait, today I've posted TWO Sunday comics! One from now and one from the past. Yes, this blog has time-travel capabilities.
The first difference you may notice in these cartoon is the pictures and captions are completely different. That's because I try (with varying success) not to copy myself. But look closer and you'll see deeper differences. Like color. In the cartoon above, the colors are nice. In the cartoon below, they are bad, ugly, hideous, flat, brash, rotten, crappy, garish, heinous, horrific, vomitous, nauseating, (consult Thesaurus to continue.)
That's because this older cartoon was drawn in 1999, just before I learned to color my cartoons on computer, instead of the old-fashioned method used by everyone from the turn of the nineteenth century until the computer age, designating each area with a number that represents the percentage of each of the available colors: red, yellow, blue, black. It was primitive and lord only knows how we managed in those days. We may as well have been coloring them with sticks dipped in plant dies in a log cabin by candlelight next to Abe Lincoln.
I do, however, like the line work in the older cartoon. Check out the hair of the victim's wife at far right, the one in the calamitous chartreuse outfit. I dig those curls.
A bit of fun backstory: I got an email from the offices of Wheel of Fortune (WoF, as we hardcore fans call it) and they liked this cartoon so much they would like an autographed copy to frame for their offices. What an honor. I wrote a book in the mid-90s about a book tour I took which was funded by readers and during which I stayed in their homes. In this book, "Bizarro Among the Savages," my driving force was spiritual advice given me by Pat Sajak. It was a true story. To my great dismay, no one from Sajak's office, or those of WoF ever contacted me about it. But then, the greatest spiritual leaders always prefer to remain in the background.
