Running With Mates

Today's Bizarro has been brought to you by the Intstitute for Ill-Considered Choices.

This has possibly been the most humorous presidential campaign in American history. Maybe the Franklin Peirce and Winfield Scott battle of 1852 was a real laugh riot, but as far back as I can remember (which was JFK vs Nixon, but I was too young to understand the jokes), this was by far the funniest.

Although John McCain is clearly smarter than W (I know, that isn't saying much), his gaffs have been stellar. Addressing a crowd of supporters as "my fellow prisoners," is undoubtedly one of the funniest Freudian slips a politician has ever made.



But the real comedy has come in the form of Sarah Palin, of course. You could not have scripted a more comical, less appropriate running mate if you tried. (Of course, the last time I said that was in 2000, when the GOP nominated W. and look how unfunny that turned out.) The most deft Hollywood screenwriter could not have gotten away with a character like her in a movie without offending audiences with the slapstick preposterousness of it. Thank god for Sarah Palin and thank another god for John McCain's poor campaign staff for choosing a publicity stunt over a qualified candidate. Not only did it nail the GOP coffin shut, it provided us with months of quality political satire. Much of it coming from Palin herself.

I pray she runs for president in 2012.

History Hits Us Between The Eyes

Today's the day, boys and girls and undecideds. Even if you're in a state with it's head screwed on straight and O is a shoo-in, get out there and pull the switch. Make me proud.

(To head off any confusion, the person at right is me, not McCain. I'm not actually on the ballot this year.)

Politix

This Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by the fine folks at How Did This Happen?

This cartoon originally ran with an egregious error in the caption. Instead of the word "executives," it said, "CEOs." Companies virtually never have more than one CEO, which I knew, but for some reason my brain didn't tell me when I was writing and inking it.

A not-too-polite right-winger wrote to me and alerted me to my mistake in very colorful language. I suspect he is one of those couple dozen people still on the Bush Bandwagon.

Since this is the day before the most important election in this nation's history in nearly a century, here are a couple more political cartoons I created at the request of a magazine which eventually decided not to run them. If you like them, feel free to pass them on.



If you're having trouble reading the captions, click on the images to enlarge them.

Ask Dan

I got a few questions from yesterday's post about my drawing process, so I thought I'd answer them here:

Do you take notes during the day when ideas occur to you?
No. Ideas never occur to me unless I'm sitting down to write cartoons, which I only do first thing in the morning. 99% of all my cartoons have been written in the first hour of the day. After that, the voices in my head begin and I can't hear myself think.

What do you do when your hand slips and you make a mistake?
I've been doing this daily since I was a child, so my hands don't slip any more. On the rare occasion when I do make a mistake or want to change something, I just do it on my computer. If the original art sells or gets donated to a charity auction, I fix the art with a little touch of opaque white ink. The last time I made a mistake bad enough that I had to start over was in 1995 when my first wife unexpectedly announced she was leaving me for a woman and both of them were joining the Israeli Army.

You've shown cartoons that have been rejected for Bizarro, can you show one that was rejected, then accepted after revision?
No. I never rewrite and resubmit a cartoon, in my mind it either works as is or it doesn't. The only exception I can think of was once when the syndicate rejected a cartoon for political reasons. I really liked the cartoon and had no other market for it, so I resubmitted it a week later without changing it at all except to dust it with baby powder. Sometimes the smell of baby powder makes people happy. They still rejected the cartoon, though.

I was hoping you would link the words "oil painting" to Bob Ross.
The next time you have a brilliant idea like this, tell me BEFORE I publish the post.

Why don't you just use the Cintiq screen for the entire image?
That's a good question and one I asked myself when I first got the screen. I have done that on occasions where I was living away from home for an extended amount of time, like when my wife and I spent a couple months in a jungle cottage in Costa Rica. Instead of bringing tons of art supplies, a scanner, my computer and my screen, I just brought my Cintiq screen and a laptop. I did all the art on the screen, start to finish, then uploaded it via Internet. (Which was the only electronic convenience the cottage had, oddly enough.)
Problem was, there was no physical art to sell to collectors, donate for auctions, etc. So I went back to drawing them on paper, which I prefer anyway.

Where do babies come from?
You wouldn't believe me if I told you and the story would probably make you a little queasy. Let's just say, the less you know, the better.

Cartoon Questions Answered

Several commentators on this blog have asked me to go into more detail about how I create my comics, color them, convert from panel to strip, make them squeak when you step on them, etc.

So here goes:

This is the cartoon I published last Xmas, and a gag I like pretty well. The original ink drawing looked like the black and white image here, is about 6"x7", india ink on bristol board. (Have these riveting details put you to sleep yet?)


This is the cartoon after it is colored, which I do in Photoshop, CMYK mode. I won't explain exactly how I do it because I spent a lot of years experimenting with various techniques to arrive here and I don't want just anyone to be able to perfectly knock it off (assuming there is anyone out there who might want to). But I will say that I color in transparent layers, a technique I learned from oil painting.

You can see that the color scheme in this one is a bit unorthodox, using a slightly different monochromatic
palette for each character. I don't do it often, but in a composition like this one with lots going on, it can be a nice way to simplify the image a bit, instead of it looking like a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand different colors.

Here is the strip version, concocted on the computer in Photoshop by cutting, pasting and moving things around. I have a cool computer screen which you can draw directly on with a stylus, called a Cintiq, made by a company called Wacom. In this way, I can draw extra stuff into the blank spots created by the new format.In this case, I had to add a whole new character to deliver the punch line, the original speaker having been decapitated. I also reversed the image, which I do frequently. There is a principle in comedy that you want the punch line to be as close to the end as possible. In a cartoon, sometimes the image is the punch line for relatively straightforward dialogue, sometimes the dialogue is the punch line for a relatively normal picture, as in this case. In the panel version, I don't have a lot of choice of whether the reader sees the pic or the caption first, but in the strip version I have more control. So the punchline always goes to the right, whether it's the pic or the words.

I hope this was less dull to read than it was to type. Enjoy the rest of your day and feel free to ask specific questions about the process in the comments.

Break-Neck Speed

(Click on this image for a larger, funnier view)

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Buses That Are Bad For Business.

I have a couple friends who are chiropractors, but I have to admit I don't believe in it. It scares the crap out of me. I've visited a chiropractor three times in my life, each time I spent the next 3-to-6 months with a very sore neck that seemed it would never go away.

I have a few friends that are in the mob, but I have to admit I don't believe in them. They scare the crap out of me. I've been visited by the mob three times in my life, each time I spent the next 3-to-6 months trying to get out of the locked trunk of a car.

And this is a perfect example of how a cartoonist gets ideas. I took these two real-life experiences, combined them, and voila! I created a cartoon that is at once obtuse and mysterious.



This next image is the title panel that appeared with it in some markets. I include it here today because I just happen to really like this image. The colors, the odd drawing, the lack of frelschbargen. What's not to like?

Throw Out the Vote

Bizarro is brought to you today by Political Justice.

This classic Bizarro appeared in papers days before the last presidential election in '04, and it is my favorite political cartoon I've ever done. At that time, Rove was in full swing as liar-in-chief for W's reelection campaign.

When this first ran, I received a few emails from angry readers who were still on the Bush bandwagon. Amazingly, one of them whose email was particularly vitriolic, wrote back the next year when a lot of info about Rove and Scooter Libby were in the news, and apologized for his original email. He had seen the light.

Rove is one of my least favorite humans in the world. Though dirty tricks have never been unusual in politics, he has taken them to new levels, finding ways to blatantly lie to the American public in ways that play to people's most base qualities of bigotry and fear, thus getting them to vote against their own interests to avoid an imagined threat. McCain was a victim of this kind of campaigning when he lost the nomination to Bush, but now uses the same tactics against Obama with robo-calls that attempt to convince voters that he is everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a Manchurian Candidate. The examples linked above are not necessarily Rove's creations, of course, but he has inspired this environment of ends-justifies-the-means sort of campaigning.

Yes, as some of you are saying right now, the Democrats have done their share of lying. But the facts will verify that nothing along the order of Rove's tactics are as ubiquitous among Democratic campaigns as they have become in Republican ones.

It seems now that most of America is rebelling against this kind of abuse of power, as McCain continues to plummet in the polls and shows on the Fox News Channel's ratings are experiencing a distinct downward slide. Let's all pray it sticks, before the Neo-Cons take our country into the Third World for good.

Unless it is already too late.

On another note, when this cartoon first came out, something in my schedule prohibited me from being able to color it myself. There is a default system in place when this happens and the syndication company has a unit that colors cartoons for artists. Some artists use this service routinely, instead of coloring their work themselves. You can see from this example how the colors in this version look much more like the average daily comics.