Bizarre Reality: Dan Piraro Celebrates 20
Kristen Twedt
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On January 22, Brooklyn cartoonist Dan Piraro celebrated his 20^th anniversary producing Bizarro, the single-panel cartoon distributed by King Features Syndicate and first published by Chronicle Features.  Piraro, with wickedly funny cartoons that often poke fun at political targets and support animal rights, is a three-time, consecutive winner of the National Cartoonist’s Society’s “Best Newspaper Cartoon Panel.”

His many book titles include:

Life Is Strange And So Are You: A Bizarro Sunday Treasury
(Pick this up!)

Bizarro Among the Savages: A Relatively Famous Guy’s Experiences on the Road and in the Homes of Strangers
(Pick this up!)

and The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House.
(Pick this up!)

Arriviste regular Kristen Twedt recently spoke with Piraro about breaking into cartooning, Vespas, politics, and a bunch of other stuff.

A_P:  The first I heard of your cartoons, you were traveling the country on a book tour and staying in the homes of your fans. Tell me about that strange journey.

DP: That entire odyssey was captured in my book Bizarro Among the Savages (Andrews McMeel, 1997). The plan was to write the book as soon as I got back, but I had to finish it much later. The tour ended because I found out my wife was cheating on me. It was rough there for quite a while, but I finally wrote the book a year later. We divorced. Things have been markedly better since then.

A_P: What was it like meeting your fans?

DP: I am generally trusting of most people. It wasn’t like I had no idea what these people would be like. They were selected from a pool of people who had written because they were fans. I told them I would need plane tickets, someone to pick me up and drive me around and feed me. I figured if they were willing to do that, they would be trustworthy. They were more than eager to meet me at the airport or drive me to the local taco stand for lunch.

I was passed from one person to the next, over 6 months, 9 to 10 days at a time. I would usually cover four cities each leg, then go home for a bit. It wasn’t continuous. The people were great, no real big surprises there.

A_P: How did you get started in cartooning?

DP: When I quit college, I was on a fine arts scholarship because my mom wanted me to get an education. She actually got me the scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis. She put my artwork together in a portfolio, sent it off for the scholarship for me and got it. I didn’t like it all and quit after one semester. But then, my parents said, “OK, if you don’t want to go to school, that’s fine. But if you are going to live here, you’ll start paying rent.” Well, I didn’t want to pay rent to someone who cared if I had a girl in my room or if the aroma of pot was coming out from under the door. I moved to another place. And that’s about the time I realized that I had nothing to offer the world but good hand skills.

A_P: Have you always drawn cartoons, put the humor with the pictures you create?

DP: As a kid, I was just driven to draw. It was my favorite thing to do. This sounds cliché, but I always felt I was born to do that. It’s more natural to me than anything else. I did it constantly, and I really don’t remember how it started. I don’t know if anyone ever said, “Here’s a crayon and a piece of paper. Go draw.” It’s a part of my earliest memories.

A_P:  Your tongue-in-cheek autobiographical profiles at bizarre.com feature words like “ennui” and “sartorial.” And you drive a Vespa? These are fairly intellectual terms for a gag writer, aren’t they? Do you read a lot?