an alien in a spaceship (the Flying Saucer of Possibility),.a piece of pie (the Pie of Opportunity),.

an eyeball (the Eyeball of Observation),.Most Bizarro cartoons since 1995 include one or more of these devices hidden somewhere in the cartoon: Hidden symbols ĭan Piraro's Bizarro Sunday (March 8, 2009), depicting Gumby and Pokey. Creatively restive, Piraro also produces fine art, some of which uses the Catholic imagery that he was exposed to at parochial school. (For example, he once used the Etruscans as a punchline if you skipped history class that day, tough.) The 54-year-old Kansas City, Missouri, native has also begun participating in the nascent vaudeville revival with his one-man Bizarro Bologna Show, an entertainment potpourri into which he incorporates puppetry, song, ventriloquism, mind reading and drawing (not to mention slides of Bizarro cartoons too blue for newspaper publication). (He also espouses animal rights in his work, for which the Humane Society honored him in January with its Genesis Award.) Though his humor is never didactic, Piraro's work is remarkable in its unwillingness to pander, even when the occasional panel borders on the inscrutable. In a comic universe where world-weary talking dogs exist alongside nihilistic housewives, Piraro gives his cartoons heft by skewering his own bêtes noires: wasteful consumerism, environmental destruction, corporate greed and sheeplike people, to name a few. Piraro has taken his panel in directions simultaneously surreal and topical.

Comics critic Tom Heintjes described Bizarro's themes, cryptic aspects and expansion into performance art: Some cartoons involve celebrities, such as Sheryl Crow and Penn Jillette, while others make reference to themselves or characters from comics or animation, such as Superman and Gumby. Piraro has described it as 'about the incredibly surreal things that happen to all of us in our so-called 'normal' lives.' The situations are surreal, yet often plausible. Characters and story īizarro gives an eccentric, exaggerated and, as the name implies, bizarre look at everyday life. Wayno had been collaborating on writing the strip since 2009 and had drawn the strip for a few previous stretches. On January 1, 2018, Piraro's friend and colleague Wayne 'Wayno' Honath took over creative duties on the daily strip, with Piraro continuing to do the Sunday strip. Initially syndicated by Chronicle Features, it moved to the Universal Press Syndicate in 1995 and then King Features Syndicate in 2003. Launched January 21, 1985, the panel appears daily in 350 markets throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Dan Piraro's Bizarro daily (September 2, 2008)īizarro is a single- panel cartoon written and drawn by cartoonist Dan Piraro and later by cartoonist Wayne 'Wayno' Honath.

Bizarro Comics by Joey Cavalieri