I Know Why the Caged Bird Paints

I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday Bizarro comic above is mine, as are the comments below. The past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics that follow were written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.

And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.

———————————————————————————————————— 

Welcome, Jazz Pickles. 

If the cartoon above looks familiar, it is because I featured a previous version of it in a blog post here on April 20, 2025, in a post titled “Drawing Conclusions.” 

That version was originally published in 1996. I quite liked it then, but had yet to learn Photoshop and was still coloring the Sunday comics the old-fashioned way, using the antiquated, industry-standard printing methods of the early 1900s.

Since I now have Photoshop skills and I love the theme of the cartoon, I decided to rework and republish it. The Secret Symbols are different, too. Compare and contrast at your leisure.

The prison theme leads me to recommend a terrific documentary series I just discovered this week on AppleTV+ (also available on Prime), called Lincoln’s Dilemma. It is particularly relevant to what’s happening in the US today, as racist fascism attempts to bulldoze our country. 

The series is beautifully directed and produced, and the art direction is a cut above what I’ve come to expect from docuseries. It also includes much about Lincoln, his presidency, and the Civil War that isn’t commonly included in more heroic tellings of his life. This short review in Variety explains that well.

Both Wayno and I have recently written about the current administration’s abandonment of the Constitution, and have received some coarse backlash. In Wayno’s weekly Substack newsletter this past week, he eloquently described his feelings about a few angry (former) Bizarro readers who admonished him for his views.

“[They] could not tolerate cartoonists who dared to express distaste for totalitarianism, dictatorship, know-nothingism, or state-sponsored cruelty.

“We’re grateful for the support and readership of all of you who understand that cartoonists are full humans, endowed with thoughts and opinions, which we occasionally express outside of our daily rectangular forums.

“Fair warning: From time to time, we might speak in defense of kindness, fairness, equality, tolerance, and science.”

I’ve reprinted it here because I could not have said it better myself.

One encouraging aspect of Lincoln’s Dilemma is the historical perspective that America has been here before and managed to come back to its senses. I continue to hope we’ll stifle it again, that it does not take another devastating civil war to achieve, and that we will take stronger steps to douse the mindless racism that has plagued this continent since colonization. 

The hypocrisy is beyond belief when you realize that every one of the white supremacists in the White House, Congress, and around the country is descended from the very class of people they are kidnapping, deporting, and imprisoning without due process: immigrants. None of these hypocrites is Native American.

If you think racism has nothing to do with it, note that none of the President's grandparents and only one of his parents (his father) were born in the US. It is also pertinent to note that two of his wives — including Melania Trump — were not natural American citizens. But all of these people happen to be white.

Sorry for the political rant. I hate being inspired to do it.