PROFILE The Mind Behind Bizarro

THE MUSE

A red duck must waddle up his front step each morning and speak to him. Or an anonymous stranger spells out messages in colored blocks on the front seat of his car. Perhaps Arabic alphabets bubble from the old oboe he found at a garage sale. Something. There must be something strange and mystical about the invention, some extra-earthly explanation for the refracted reality of Dan Piraro’s daily cartoon, “Bizarro.”

Piraro knows it is what’s expected. People who frequent his panel, in the Dallas Times Herald or the thirty-four other newspapers in which “Bizarro” appears, want to hear of magic. Those who ask-sooner or later, almost everyone does-“Where do you get all those weird ideas?” hope he’ll speak of fairies or aliens or ancient conjurations involving potatoes and nematodes and string. If he can, the Oak Cliff artist pretends he doesn’t hear that question. If not, he fumbles and huffs and struggles for a clever answer. Eventually, he coughs up the same flat, disappointing reply you’d hear from anyone ever struck with a creative idea. Though swearwords are notably absent from his conversation, his response boils down to: “Damned if I know.”

It embarrasses Piraro to say so, but the wrinkles and quirks that result in the warped world of “Bizarre” thoroughly baffle him. He simply sprawls on the curious recliner/ rocker-the one that belonged to his wife’s grandmother and used to be red but now sports the garish blue vinyl common to roadside diners-and inspiration strikes. The only requirement, he says, is distraction. A squawking television, a chatty friend, an insistent question from his four-year-old daughter-any of them can kick Piraro’s synapses into Bizarro’s private dimension. Only silence is deadly.

“I have to read a book or watch TV or talk to somebody,” Piraro says, “I have to have something going on that keeps me from thinking about the fact that I have a deadline coming up and I need to draw eight or ten cartoons. When I am talking or listening, I write down ideas almost without knowing I’m doing it. But when I”m alone, I sit here in the silence and I think, ’What? What? What?’ I don’t know how it works.”

However the creative process operates, it serves Piraro well. His oddly angular figures and strangely skewed perceptions have earned him a loyal following of, perhaps, several million readers who take comics with their coffee. Though “Bizarro” went into syndication about twenty months ago, the panels now appear not only in daily newspapers but also on greeting cards and coffee mugs. A book-length collection of “”Bizarro” cartoons hit the newsstands in September, and a second book already is in the talking stage. Stuart Dodds of Chronicle Features Syndicate, the San Francisco company that distributes “Bizarro,” calls Piraro “the most promising new cartoonist since Gary Larson started ’The Far Side.’ “

A comparison to “The Far Side”’ is particularly apt when talking about “Bizarro.” Larson, who was “discovered” by Dodds about seven years ago, pioneered the cartoon genre we’ll call, for lack of a better term, peculiarity panels. Since then, dozens of aspiring artists have copied the style, Most of them have come and gone; they were too much like Larson to survive.

Piraro, however, seems to fit the genre sufficiently to attract readers while remaining fresh enough to skirt monotony. Clearly, he learned from Larson, but the humor is not the same. In Larson’s early days, his gags often were compared to Steve Martin’s comedy. If you follow “Bizarro,” though, you’re more likely to think of Woody Allen. Take the recent “Bizarro” panel in which a graduation speaker bedecked in robe and mortarboard advises outgoing seniors: “Don’t just think of these as silly outfits, but as the first in a long line of humiliating postures life requires of you on a daily basis.” More like Sleeper than The Jerk.

For a young man raised as a Catholic, in fact, Piraro exhibits enormous dollops of that Woody Allen insecurity often labeled Jewish Angst. At twenty-seven, he is a cipher, a worrier, a walking contradiction. When things go well, he invents a crisis. His nose is too big. His hairline recedes. He can’t play the saxophone. He even frets that his comfortable, ranch-style bungalow is too conventional, too much like a house. “I know this place looks like ’Father Knows Best,’” he says, “but deep down inside, I am a very unconventional person. I’m not a suburban, middle-American, normal kid.”

Says Dallas writer Donna Gimarc, a longtime friend of Piraro’s: “Dan feels a lot of conflict between being a creative, avant-garde person and being a come-home, fatherly kind of man. I think he is afraid of being conventional, but a lot of what he wants are fairly conventional things. It is a conflict he is having to work out.” Adds Donna’s husband, KZEW disc jockey George Gimarc, “Dan is on the verge of doing well in a very competitive business. I think the idea of success scares him.”

Indeed, Piraro does seem torn by the prospect of prosperity. His modest goal, he says, is to be remembered, perhaps as the greatest cartoonist of the twentieth century. But notoriety exacts a price. Grinding out cartoons to meet weekly deadlines is taxing work. Each must tickle the public funny bone. Nothing too offbeat, nothing too serious. He is discovering what Louis Armstrong knew: you have to play three for the folks and one for yourself.



THE MOTIVATION

It was in Glamour magazine, of all places, where Piraro read an article about Cathy Guisewhite and her overnight success with a cartoon strip called “Cathy.” The story turned out to be the goad Piraro needed to try selling cartoons. But it wasn’t because the piece inspired him. It was because it made him mad.

“I was furious when I read about how well she had done with that stupid cartoon. She isn’t tunny. She can’t even draw. I don’t think you have to be an artist to do a cartoon, but you should at least be able to draw. I’m very opinionated about that. Even in a cartoon, artistic values are important.”

In fact, it is art, not humor, that is Piraro’s driving passion. Since he was old enough to hold a crayon, he has been fascinated by form, by color, by the challenge of bringing life and movement to a still, blank page. His earliest memory is of drawing, he says. It is the dominant thread running through his story.

Dan Piraro was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son in a family with three daughters. His father, a petroleum engineer and economist, moved the family often. Piraro recalls living in St. Louis. Ponea City, Oklahoma, Spokane, Washington, and Ponea City again before he finished elementary school. Eventually, the Piraros settled in Tulsa. Dan Piraro now calls that city home, even though he lives in Oak Cliff. He adds, though, “I’ve always disliked Tulsa a lot. It’s the most segregated city I’ve ever seen. And there’s nothing to do there, especially in the arts.”

In school, Piraro learned that he had a natural talent for art. In fact, he may not have learned much else. His father tells of opening young Dan’s notebooks for English, history, and math classes and finding nothing but cartoons and sketches. It was a continuing challenge to get the boy to do his homework.

“I got in a lot of trouble in school because I was always drawing horses,” says Piraro. “Even when we had art class. I’d get in trouble for drawing horses. I remember one time the nun-I went to Catholic school-told us to draw a picture to illustrate a story in the Bible. I didn’t even hear her I spent the whole time drawing horses. When she came to my desk and asked, ’What Bible story is that?’ I was very confused. I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was just a bunch of horses. She took it from me.”

During high school in Tulsa, Piraro developed his artistic interest beyond horses. He took up painting and turned out landscapes, portraits, and a whole series of surrealistic adventures. Many he gave away, but several of them sold. He found he could paint pictures that other people enjoyed and sometimes paid good money to own. He also impressed his parents and teachers with his ability. They urged him to study art in college.

Piraro claims he wanted no part of higher education, however. His aim was to paint a few pictures and see the world. But his mother wheedled and cajoled until he finally agreed to a compromise. He would go to college if she could get him a scholarship.

“I thought i( would be impossible for her to get me a scholarship.’ I thought it was a safe bet. But she sent pictures of some of my paintings to a scholarship competition. To qualify, I had to do a short essay on art. She made me do it. I did it in a very smart-aleck way, thinking that would jinx it. I refused to type it. She typed it. I didn’t get the scholarship, but I got a full grant.”

Reluctantly. Piraro went to Washington University in St. Louis as a fine arts major. From the beginning, he hated it. “They were always pumping this super modern stuff. If it means something, it can’t be art. If it isn’t broken, what is it? The place was full of people who couldn’t draw, who had no drafting skills. They were breaking glass, piling sticks of wood in the middle of the floor. They thought they could do anything and it was art as long as nobody else could tell what it was. 1 don’t think that’s art. It’s like not being able to play an instrument but saying you write symphonies. People sit around and beat on things, but there is no music.”



Despite his deal with his mother, Piraro dropped out of college after one semester. He returned to Tulsa and got a job running a store that sold plumbing supplies, Christian books, and unfinished furniture. The store was rarely busy, Piraro says, so he spent most of his time painting in a back room. A canvas that now hangs on his living room wall, a striking group of bold human figures, was painted there.

After the plumbing supply-Christian book-unfinished furniture business-that is not a joke, Piraro insists-he worked as a display artist in a Peaches record store, as a designer for a junk company that outfitted theme restaurants, and as a starving artist. He traveled by train in Europe for several months, “I must have crossed Europe at least eighteen times.” he says.

In 1979, Piraro won a commission to paint two murals for a Catholic church in Tulsa. One depicted a saint. The other showed the Holy family, “Mary. Joe. and Jesus as a teenager.” Piraro says. The job paid $1 ,000. and the young artist used the money to move to Dallas and try his voice as a singer with a New Wave band. The band landed a few gigs at Dallas clubs, but it wasn’t going anywhere so Piraro freelanced as an advertising artist to supplement his earnings,

In 1980. Piraro married a woman he had known in Tulsa named Kalin. (Pronounced Colleen. The spelling, Piraro says, is “some kind of ancient Gaelic practical joke.”) The two settled down to starve together. “We ate beans and rice for weeks at a time,” says Kalin. “We would get real excited when Bob’s Affiliated Market had TV dinners on sale, two for a dollar. TV dinners were a real treat. I finally told Dan he had to get a job or I was leaving.”

Though his portfolio was skimpy, Piraro bagged a job as an artist in the advertising department at Neiman-Marcus. The work was boring; the boss was an ass, he says. Piraro began cartooning to relieve the tedium of the job.

“I started drawing cartoons dealing with the job as nonsense. A lot of them were making fun of the bosses. Not all of them. They were very strange. Much stranger than what I do now. A lot of the people I worked with really liked them. They said I should syndicate. I said, ’No. my work is too weird.’”

Kalin became pregnant in 1981. Piraro reacted by quitting Neiman-Marcus. He earned a little money freelancing. Finally, he established himself with Bill Jenkins, who owns an advertising art studio where Piraro still works. His cartoons were forgotten.

Until he saw the article about “Cathy.”

“I figured if she could succeed as a syndicated cartoonist, anybody could do it. I decided if it was that easy, 1 would try it. It didn’t turn out to be that easy, but here I am.”



THE MILESTONE

Last September, Dan Piraro knew for sure that he had made it. “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz recognized his name.

“Bizarro” had been in syndication for about six months, and the artist was invited to an editor’s party aboard a yacht in San Francisco. Schulz was among the guests, and Piraro wangled an introduction, “We shook hands and he knew who I was,” Piraro recalls ecstatically. “He said he had read my cartoon and he liked it. I couldn’t believe it. It was the highlight of my life as a cartoonist.”

Someday, Piraro says, he hopes to be as widely read, as popular, as Schulz, Meanwhile, though, his goals are more mundane. He simply wants to earn enough money with “Bizarro” to give up his job in advertising art and still support Kalin and their daughter, Killian, comfortably,

“I want to be as far from advertising and commercial art as I can. I don’t want to ever have to deal with the mental midgets telling you what to do with your Pepsi and your Taco Bell. My dream is to have a run-down, brick-and-concrete warehouse space with lots of windows, preferably some of them broken.”

He adds, “I’m not totally in this for the money, but I’d like to make enough to have time to paint and to learn to play the saxophone. Then I’ll build a time machine and go back and play in Louis Armstrong’s band.”

So far, Piraro says, small advances totaling no more than a few thousand dollars have been his only income from “Bizarro.” But cartooning holds the lure of bigger money. A reasonably successful cartoonist often earns $60,000 a year. Good ones earn twice that. A few of the elite-well-established names like Gary Larson. Garry Trudeau. and Charles Schulz-annually collect half a million dollars or more from syndication, book royalties, and speaking fees.

“Piraro’s cartoon has been very successful as these things go,” says Dodds at Chronicle Features. “I think there is slow but sure improvement. He’s developing an instinct for what is a successful cartoon. We expect the number of papers that carry ’Bizarro’ to grow, and we think the book will do very well. He may not get rich, but he’ll do well,”

It is a bright prognosis. But Dan Piraro worries. He fears the creative muse, whatever it is, may abandon him at any moment, forcing him back to full-time ad work in the pursuit of money without meaning. “Sometimes I think, ’That’s it. I have used up all of my ideas. I’ll never be able to draw another cartoon.’ But then I’ll be sitting here talking to somebody. I’ll start writing things down, and it gets me through another week.

“How does it happen? I don’t know.”