Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Hair, Dating, Death

Bizarro is brought to you today by the 11th Commandment.

I'm back from my vacation and gosh darn it's good to see you. If I discover any cool pics from my trip, I'll be sure to post them. Just went to Florida to hang out with CHNW's dad, though, so it was pretty chill. It's really rare that I can sit around for a few days and do nothing.

I have a business trip out west next week, so I'm really slammed with deadlines. In addition to my regular unrelenting 7-cartoons-a-week schedule, I've got to do a book cover for my upcoming "Bizarro Heroes" book, which will be full of cartoons about super heroes and caped crime fighters of all kinds. I'm also supposed to do a promotional cartoon for a charity thing that King Features is doing and a couple of other things I can't recall right now. Guess I should have been writing these things down.

To some people, the life of a syndicated cartoonist may seem glamorous and fun, and it certainly can be, but I regularly work 7 days a week, at least 8 hours a day. It wears on me, just like any other job would. And no matter how stressed or tired I am, I have to come up with enough funny ideas to fill every day of my life until I retire. Just typing that sentence made my stomach hurt.

This cartoon about the couple arose recently when I found out about "speed dating." It's a real deal that people do, look it up. It makes sense in an odd, unnatural way, because all relationships play out to an end at some point, some sooner than later. Might as well get it over with, I suppose. What I've done here is to compress what usually takes a year or more into four sentences. If you can get a relationship past numbers one and two and still find some joy in it, you can avoid number four. Sometimes.

This old cartoon from my archives is one that has seriously dated itself. When I drew it, in 1996, people still carried "beepers." (More accurately called "pagers.") People under a certain age won't even know what those were. I thought I'd be happy to see them go because the beeping was an annoyance, but the electronic-super-fly-disco ringtones of today are even worse in my opinion.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer today. I'm overwhelmed with re-entry. Ugh.

7 comments:

gladysayitialley said...

hair, dating & death were fun to read. like the "bizarro" touch in your statements.... :)

Anonymous said...

Actually, Dan, "beepers" are still around. They just morphed into those discs they hand you when you go to those mid-scale restaurants like Red Lobster or [insert name of popular Italian place].

Course, those restaurants rarely have vegan fare. But if you're ever in the Ann Arbor, MI area, let me know. I can recommend several restaurants whose vegan meals are so good even meatheads eat there.

Anonymous said...

You should do a comic of a teenager in the back of a police car asking the cop to take the handcuffs off so he can update is status on Facebook.

Michael Huang said...

If saying "I love your eyes" imitates the other dater's ex, then why would they say "I love your eyes" if that's what their own exes said? Heh.

Janta said...

I'm not on facebook, so I can't click the "x people liked this" thingy; instead, here's my thumbs up :) (Is there a thumb emoticon?)

If it's any consolation, your 7-day-8-hour-work-week-misery is making the rest of us laugh (well, not that you're miserable, but the work that you do).

Ok, that's probably no consolation. Oh well. I tried.

June said...

I am impressed--no, I am awed--that it only takes you 8 hours to think up and then draw your ingenious cartoons. Do you charge overtime for more than 40 hours a week?

Double Your Dating said...

Y2K was brought up by a friend of mine as proof of the unlikelihood of anything catastrophic happening. I pointed out the Harmonic Convergence (remember that?) and when that comet crashed into Jupiter. Also: why do people assume the ancient Aztecs didn't do like we do every year: go to a different calendar? So why don't you do a little research. The Mayan calendar doesn't end on 12/31/11 it ends on 12/21 2012, at the winter solstice, which happens to be the exact same everywhere. It is significant because it is the end of the Mayan long count wheel of the calendar, and signified to ancient peoples a great shift in awareness and understanding.