Sunday, November 28, 2010

Cliche Discussion











(If you, like me, would like to see this picture bigger, click on the cartoon man's right eyelid.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Mysterious Explanations.

My favorite cartoons have always been single-panel magazine cartoons, the likes of which could once be found in National Lampoon and just about every other magazine in America, and which can now be found in The New Yorker and almost nowhere else. Within that genre is a canon of cartoon cliches that have been done millions of times in millions of ways: the psychiatrist's couch, the fish crawling out of the water and growing legs, the ascent of man, the guy stuck on a desert island, the cat and the mousehole, the guy crawling through a desert. This Sunday cartoon is particularly fun for me because I combined two of the oeuvre in one panel.

I love coming up with new versions of those standards, and especially doing satires of the standards themselves. Here is an example of one such satire from 1995, taken from my book, Life is Strange and So Are You – A Bizarro Sunday Treasury. The character in the water is mine, all the rest are borrowed from some of my favorite cartoonists (and one that I'm not a fan of at all but is highly recognizable.) See if you can figure out who is who. If you want to jump ahead, here is a diagram of which characters belong to which famous cartoonists. Most of you can guess which one I included not because I'm a fan but because of his recognizability alone.

Thanks for dropping by today, I've enjoyed pretending to talk to you.

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5 comments:

B. Avakian said...

I'm sorry to hear you hate Ziggy. My mom will be very disappointed.

dan said...

Jack Ziegler! Neat. He was my best friend's dad, growing up. All his books were at the public library (Hamburger Madness especially) and it was a great treat getting to take them out and then see the originals on the wall of his studio!

Hooray Jack Ziegler

Piraro said...

@dan h...very cool. I've never met Jack but love his work. Hamburger Madness was a big influence on my early work.

Emily Barnes said...

@ Piraro, could i use your cartoon of the 2012 mayan calender comic in my schools newspaper for no financial benefit?

Leif Hagen said...

Dan the Cartoon Man - my wife and I love, love your Bizarro comics! Such a hoot! Hope your Daddio had a good b-day today!
Kind regards from the EAGAN daily photo blog