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Published — 26 July 2026 ⏭ cultura

Light or Dark?

I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday comic above is mine, as are all of the below-cartoon comments to follow. 

Since January 2018, the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics have been written and drawn by my comics partner, Wayno. For more fun, check out Wayno’s weekly blog post.

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

Hello again, Jazz Pickles, or for the first time, stranger.

My partner Olive Oyl and I returned this week from our two-week sojourn up the coast of Southern California. We visited various family members and friends along the way, and, before heading back to Mexico, we spent a couple of days in San Luis Obispo, a charming little town in Central California that we wish we could afford to live in. 

It’s not that San Luis Obispo is a gated community for millionaires, but these days, you have to be a millionaire to live in any city in the US that O2 and I would want to wake up in daily. Prices on everything from gas to groceries, and housing to antifa algae-propagating supplies have gone crazy since the Führer Wannabe “lowered prices on day one.” Lucky us. 

Here are some photos that do not capture the highlights of our trip.

This atypical house is in a typical residential neighborhood of San Luis Obispo, and I think it’s really cool.

Left: Two human constructions and some tiny humans. Right: Two seagulls with three legs.

Left: A few minutes from San Luis Obispo is Morro Rock Beach. Not sure how it got its name. Right: Olive Oyl points at the Pacific Ocean in Malibu.

O2 and me too.

Thanks for caring about what Wayno and I do here each week. If you’d like to help us scrape by in these tough times, we hope you’ll consider some of the links at the end of this post. We appreciate your readership and your support.

This seems like a great time to review one of Wayno’s rare thematic weeks of Bizarro cartoons…

He would probably enjoy the proverbial train at the end of the tunnel, too.

Okay, son, but don’t be careful.

This drawing is as close to an Oscar as Wayno or I are likely to get despite our convincing portrayals of slackers doing our best to avoid Walmart jobs.

Have you spotted the theme of this week’s cartoons yet?

Even a dummy can see it coming.

One point in favor of self-driving cars is that they don’t text or check email while driving.

That concludes this week’s crash course for dummies, Jazz Pickles. If you enjoy that we do this for free each week, please consider helping us keep it that way via the links below. We’ll put in a good word for you with the head of Antifa.

The Naked Cartoonist…My every-other-week creative-writing subscription service.

Limited edition, signed & numbered prints of BIZARRO CARTOONS, and some ORIGINALS!

Bizarro TIP JAR …One-time or repeating. Your choice!

WAYNO’S TIP JAR …One-time or repeating. Your choice!

My (free) graphic novel in progress, PEYOTE COWBOY.

Watch my PITCH VIDEO and become a supporter of Peyote Cowboy here.

Super fun BIZARRO SWAG from ComicsKingdom, including women’s V-neck styles! (And some weird shit from other comics that doesn’t even belong in our shop. Sorry about that.)

Odyssey translator Emily Wilson on what Nolan's Odyssey is missing

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It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male protagonist embarks on a desperate quest to recover a female love object. But, as Emily Wilson argues, while Homer’s Odyssey might seem the perfect source material for Nolan, the ancient Greek poem also excels at many things the director isn't so good at, not least dialogue and characterisation.

Wilson, who has translated both the Odyssey and the Iliad, joins Thomas Jones to talk through the new adaptation, discussing its echoes of Nolan’s earlier films and his use of the Trojan Horse as a parable about wars built on lies. They also look at the compositional history of Homer’s poem and consider why this archetypal journey narrative is also a story about stasis and the desire to resist time.

Read Emily's review of The Odyssey film here: https://lrb.me/wilsonodysseyyt

Listen to Emily and Tom's Close Readings episode on the Odyssey here:

Apple: https://lrb.me/odysseyapple
Spotify: https://lrb.me/odysseyspotify
LRB website: https://lrb.me/odysseyweb

GET 50% OFF a 12-month Close Readings subscription with the code 'SUMMER50' when you sign up here:

https://lrb.me/atasummer50

ABOUT CLOSE READINGS

Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books which looks at different periods and themes in literature through selections of key texts, covering poetry, fiction, history and philosophy from Ancient Greece to the present day.

ABOUT THE LRB

The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.

As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
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