Every 11 minutes, a vegetarian commits food suicide in the United States. They eat themselves to death. Hear that "thump!" coming from the upstairs apartment? That was another vegetarian dropping from a heart attack. Next scheduled thump in 10 minutes, 56 seconds.

This undoubtedly comes as a surprise to millions of folks who falsely assume that vegetarianism is an effective weight-loss technique. If you are among those who hold this misconception, consider this: French fries drowning in a vat of melted cheese is, technically, a vegetarian dish. So is a bowl of Fruit Loops floating in whole milk and a cheese omelet with extra butter. If you think you can lose weight on foods like these, you've likely also given your banking information to that guy in Nigeria who is trying to transfer his fortune to the U.S.

Okay, I made up that statistic about 11 minutes, but the fact remains that we all know obese vegetarians whose hearts think they are trying to pull a locomotive out of a swamp every time they attempt to get out of a chair. The reason is that even though they are not eating meat --per se-- they are eating liquid meat in the form of eggs and dairy products. Eggs are literally liquid chickens, and almost nothing on earth is more fattening than dairy. There's actually a very good reason for this.

Milk is baby food. Mammals produce it to get their babies off to a good start, so naturally it is extremely fattening and packed with enough protein to double your size in a matter of weeks. Whether you're a human or an opossum, the basic idea is to get your baby fattened up as fast as possible so that it is too heavy to be carried off by a bird of prey. Nature did not intend it to be consumed beyond infancy, that's why we grow teeth and our mother's kick us to the curb.

Every other mammal on the planet instinctively abides by this rule. But in our infinite wisdom, we humans ignore this perfect system created by millions of years of evolution. And not only do we continue to guzzle this amazing ass-expanding fluid for the rest of our lives, we step outside of our own species to get it. Which begs the question: What makes cows so special?

Would you drink a glass of warm dog milk before bedtime? Would you float your frosted flakes in the booby juice of a rat? Would you order a grande mocha latte if they used steamed milk from a pig? For that matter, if there were millions of women who worked as wet nurses for Borden's, would you buy a carton of human milk? Obviously, we've been brainwashed by a lifetime of advertising telling us that cow's milk is natural and wholesome and healthy. Nothing short of that email from Nigeria could be further from the truth.

Fact: the calcium you get from milk comes with artery-clogging saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, and pus.
Fact: the calcium you get from leafy greens comes with fiber, antioxidants, and vitamin C.
Fact: anyone following your sizeable posterior down the street knows you're addicted to dairy.

If you're vegetarian because you don't want to hurt animals, take that extra baby step to vegan. The veal industry exists because of the dairy industry. The rightful owner of the milk you're drinking is languishing in a wooden box with a chain around his neck.

If you're still eating eggs, keep in mind that with the possible exception of Britney Spears's next husband, no animal suffers more than an egg-laying hen. Even so-called "free range" chickens are screwed. "Free range" has no legal standard and usually means "Living on a concrete slab in a tin warehouse, but hey, NO CAGES!" And even these "lucky" birds are butchered when they stop spitting out product. Do them and your arteries a favor and hop over to vegan.

If you're vegetarian for health reasons, take that step even faster. You'll look and feel better in no time. So some heart surgeon will have to wait another few months to buy that yacht– he'll get over it.

Brooklyn-based cartoonist Dan Piraro avoids booby juice and all other forms of baby food. His cartoons and other opinions on veganism can be found at bizarro.com.

June 21, 2007
An Interview with Dan Piraro

An interview with cartoonist, comedian, and fine artist Dan Piraro
Image copyright (c) Dan Piraro 2007. Cecil Vortex.com | Conversations about Creativity


Dan Piraro's Bizarro was first syndicated in 1985 and currently appears daily in around 250 markets on four continents. Bizarro won an unprecedented three consecutive Reuben awards from the National Cartoonist Society for "Newspaper Cartoon Panel of the Year," in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Since 2002, Piraro has been nominated each year for their highest award, "Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year." In 2006, Abrams Books published Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro, a retrospective that includes cartoons, fine art, commercial illustration, and images from his sketchbooks and comedy shows.

Piraro's one-man stage show, The Bizarro Baloney Show, is a multimedia performance featuring stand-up comedy, songs, puppets, cartoons, animation, audience participation, and onstage improv drawings. In 2002 it won "Best Solo Show" at the New York International Fringe Festival. Piraro also works as an activist for animal welfare, public health, and environmental concerns. In 2007 he became a regular contributor to Veg News Magazine, with a monthly humor article on vegetarianism, veganism, and animal rights. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Ashley Smith, a full-time animal welfare activist. They both sit on the board of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY. (woodstocksanctuary.org)

Dan Piraro on the Web: bizarro.com, fine art gallery, Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro


Cecil Vortex: What do you think is the key to good cartoon writing?

Dan Piraro: I have this ongoing effort to create humor in fewer words because I'm very wordy. I always have been. I was that way in school. When a teacher would say to write a 500-word paper about something or other, I would write 750 just because I'm a wordy person. So something that I've done over the years, especially in recent years, is try to reduce the number of words in my cartoons just because I think it's funnier to say things simply and quickly than to over explain. But my cartoons still tend to be pretty wordy.

One of my favorite cartoonists in the world is Sam Gross. He's most notable from the New Yorker magazine. His work is just fantastic and he rarely uses words. And when he does, it's almost never more than three or four. I'd love to be able to do that, but it's just not the way I think.

CV: There's some kind of irony in somebody who feels they write too much creating a single-panel comic.

DP: Yeah [laughter] I know. I actually started by trying to do strips and they just were too forced. And then I started doing panels, and bang, people just liked them way better.

Ever since I was a child, my favorite cartoons have always been single-panel magazine gags without regular characters, without storylines -- a single glimpse of life, and your brain figures out what just happened before this picture or what's about to happen after it. I love that kind of humor. And so that's what I was best at.

CV: I understand that to syndicate a cartoon, you first need to stockpile a large number of comics. Was that a challenge for you?

DP: Early on it was very hard. See, on the one hand, I really love starting with a blank page -- starting with nothing every day. I don't like the restrictions of having characters or storylines. But on the other hand, it makes it harder because you're starting from zero every single day -- you have nothing to build on.

When I first got syndicated I had written maybe two hundred cartoons, most of which weren't really publishable…. So I was just out to sea. I instantly had to start writing a joke a day without fail to keep going. And that was terrifying because every joke you write, at that point you just think, "Oh my gosh, what if I only had 327 jokes? What if I was born with 327 jokes in my head and I just wrote the 326th?" You always feel like you're about to run out. But to my pleasant surprise over the years, I've noticed that it gets easier. And of course it makes perfect sense. Anything you practice tends to get easier. And so I've been sitting down and trying to make my brain jump through that hoop every single day for twenty-two years.

I used to write every single day. My creative time for writing cartoons is first thing in the morning, the first hour in the morning before my brain is too polluted…. Nowadays, in contrast, I don't write more than about twice a week. I'll sit down for an hour and I'm able to come up with a week's worth of jokes. And then I just draw whenever I get the chance. I can actually produce a week's worth of artwork in two days. And I can write a week's worth in two hours. So I've really cut down my work time to two days a week, just strictly for what appears in the newspaper.

CV: Is there anything to which you attribute your ability to get through those early days?

DP: Well, um, panic [laughter]. You hear about those people who work best under deadline, and I'm definitely one of them. If I don't have a deadline, I just probably won't do it.

Before I got syndicated, I wrote cartoons out of desperation to get out of the advertising business. I was just looking for a way to make a living as an artist, and commercial illustrators make a living as an artist so you'd think I'd be happy. But I wasn't. I really disliked the whole advertising game…. At some point I just thought, "Well maybe that would be an avenue for me. I'm kind of a funny guy and I can draw. Maybe I could be a cartoonist." So that was the only thing -- the self-imposed deadline of trying to get out of advertising -- that forced me to write those first cartoons.

But it wasn't anything like an idea a day. It probably took me two years to come up with 100 jokes or 150. I just did it whenever the mood hit me. And then suddenly I was syndicated and on a schedule and bam -- I had to come up with a joke a day indefinitely, without fail or I would lose my opportunity. So then the panic switched from getting out of illustrating to just keeping my job. And of course the job didn't pay enough to get me out of advertising. So then I was stuck with both. I had the panic of the deadline and I hated my day job. And that went on for years before I made enough to be able to get away from it.

CV: If you could jump back in time, is there any advice you'd give your younger self? And is there any particularly good advice you've gotten from someone else?

DP: I think the things that I know are things that you have to learn through experience. I don't know that I could go back twenty-two years and say, "Simplify the drawings. Make them more fluid. Get to the joke faster." Those are the kinds of things I was struggling to do all along and just needed experience to get me there.

Most creativity is a combination of instinct and practice. I'm always suspicious of anybody who has some kind of succinct advice to give, because I think it's different in all cases. Ernie Bushmiller, who did [the comic strip] Nancy, he's famous inside the syndicated-cartoon world for having said, "Dumb it down." He'd say, "You know, I like your work, but you'd need to dumb it down, dumb it down." And that was his belief -- that a cartoon needed to be excruciatingly dumb and obvious for people to enjoy it. And it worked for him. And people who love Nancy will say, "It's just so dumb, I can't resist it." It obviously worked for him. But it would not have worked for Gahan Wilson. It would not have worked for me….

I think that all great art comes from inside, and it's a combination of your own instincts and talents and the amount of practice and effort that you put into it. And eventually you get somewhere good and that becomes your secret.

CV: Over the years, have you developed any habits or mental tricks that help you get focused and working?

DP: Yes, and I picked this up as a kid. I noticed early on that when I would go to an art show or a gallery or a museum, I would immediately get inspired by the creative efforts of other people, and I would go home and start drawing or painting. It's just always affected me that way.

Now I do that with the Internet. I get on the Internet and I look at art and I look at comics and I look at cartoons and various websites. It's exactly the same feeling as going to a museum and then going home and drawing a picture. Something about it inspires me. And it's got to be good work…. I couldn't just pop open a newspaper and read the most boring family cartoon in there and get inspired to write. It's got to be stuff that makes me think or makes me laugh, especially. Humor's always my favorite thing.

CV: Have you ever tried any idea-generating techniques?

DP: To be honest, I've never come to a point in my life where I felt that I needed help, because I've typically got enough ideas to get by. The worst time for me was when I went through a divorce. I was married for sixteen years and I had a couple of kids. They were younger -- ten and fifteen. And I caught my wife cheating on me, which was a terribly painful event.

Within a couple of days, she moved out, and that was just the end of a marriage. And I didn't even know we were having trouble. It was like, Monday everything was fine and by Wednesday my entire world had fallen apart. My kids were crying. And, you know, it was just a really, really horrible time. At the time I was convinced that, were it not for the kids, I would kill myself. That's how miserable I was. And yet I had to write a funny idea every day and keep my cartoon deadline going. And it just felt like such a curse. That was the one time in my life when it was really, really hard.

And I don't remember how I got through it. I just sat down every day and forced myself to look at cartoon books and look at art books and make my mind wander into that zone and come up with something, anything that would pass for a cartoon, jot it down, draw it, send it in, and move on to the rest of the day's suicidal thoughts. [laughter]

CV: Do you ever look back at those cartoons or do you leave them alone?

DP: You know, I have looked back. And they're not bad. There's maybe a few less really inspired ideas than there might normally be. But for the most part they're fine. And I didn't get caught…. I was suicidal for probably six months and really miserable for another six. So there's a full year of cartoons. But honestly speaking, when I look back now, I don't think they're that different. I don't think that somebody who didn't know I was going through a personal tragedy would ever know that there was anything wrong. Somehow I managed to fake it.

And ever since then I've just thought, "Well, you know, deadlines don't scare me at all now. As long as my life isn't a complete catastrophe, I'll come up with something. I'll be able to do this." Going through that and not missing a deadline really relaxed my attitude toward my job.

CV: It sounds like, creatively, you're now in one of the best spots you've been in.

DP: Absolutely. I feel better about my career now than I ever have. And I'm just enjoying it more. It comes more easily. And I'm also getting nice reviews and accolades and good things are happening. So I would say I'm in a better place now than I have been all along.

CV: Bizarro has a number of repeating symbols -- the firecracker, the Bunny of Exuberance, the Inverted Bird. Where did that come from?

DP: The story behind it is that I started it entirely with an upside-down bird. And I did it just to entertain myself. One of my favorite things as a kid was Highlights magazine. And my favorite puzzle in there was "find this list of hidden objects in this elaborate picture." I always enjoyed doing that, and I was always good at it because I had a good visual mind.

So I was drawing my cartoons one day, this would have been in the mid-90s I guess, and purely on a whim I drew a little upside-down bird hanging underneath a countertop or something like that. And I thought, "Oh this is a fun, a little out-of-place thing. I wonder if anybody will notice." And I just sent it off and that was that.

A week later I thought, "I think I'll throw that bird in there again. That might be kind of fun for readers if they see this upside-down bird every now and then." And then the third time I did it, I started getting mail, and sure enough people were like, "Am I the only person who's written you? I'm noticing this upside-down bird. It's like the third time I've seen it. What's this about?" And I thought, "Well this is as much fun for other people as it is for me." So I started doing it regularly.

I've been told over the years that there are far more licensing opportunities in regular characters than in this kind of joke-a-day world that I live in, and that I should create regular characters. And I despise that idea. I've never been tempted to create regular characters. But in a way I thought, "Oh well, this will be sort of my tip to regular characters. I'll have regular characters [that are] out-of-place objects."

CV: So it's primarily a way to play with your audience?

DP: Yeah, it is. And people love it. Every single time I do a comedy show or a public-speaking event, every single time, somebody will raise their hand and ask about the little figures. And I tell them, "You know, honestly, the reason I do it is so you'll ask why I do it." It's really just something to play around with. Just to make people wonder, "What that's for? Why's he doing that?" And it's kind of worked. I've become known now as that guy who has the little pie in his cartoons.

CV: I've fallen into your trap.

DP: Exactly -- everybody does. That's what's fun about it. [laughter]
Category: Conversations about Creativity |

If you're interested, here is the URL to a podcast of an interview of me. I phoned in the interview, so the sound isn't great, but you can understand it fine.

http://www.vegan.com/diner/2006/diner-2006-11-21.mp3

Have a jazztown, hootenanny holiday!

Yes, i still suck quite audibly when it comes to posting something on my blog. Just can't get around to it very often.
Important new thingies in my tiny life include:

1.I read an amazing article in Rolling Stone magazine that confirms with hard facts what I (and many others) have believed through logic. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

2.I finally started my graphic novel and I'm very happy with the way it is turning out. The further I get into it, however, the more clearly I see that this is an enormous undertaking. Writing a novel is even more difficult than reading one.

3. Discovered a new author lately, George Saunders. Very strange short stories. I love them. Try "The Brief and Terrifying Reign of Phil" and see what you think. Not all his stories are this surreal, but if you don't like this one, he probably isn't your cup of tea.

4. Discovered some new music lately. Arctic Monkeys, The Raconteurs, The Walkmen, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Dead 60s, 22-20s (not Matchbox 20, careful),Gnarles Barkley. If you know of any bands like these that I might like, let me know.

5. I continue to be amazed how anyone can support this president.

That's it for now. Since only a couple of people read this thing, I won't promise to be more diligent about writing in the future. I hate to make promises I can't keep.

I manage to get around to this MySpace thing only every other week or so. No wonder nobody subscribes to this blog. I almost never post anything on it. I'm told this is a great way to promote myself, but I don't have time to get to know it well enough to figure out how to do that. I suspect this entire site was designed for folks with way more free time than I.

The National Cartoonists Society's annual convention was last weekend in Chicago. It's great to hang out with my colleagues, many of whom have become good friends. I MC the awards show every year and get a huge kick out of it. Chicago is an amazing city. Go there and see it. Tell them I sent you. Don't miss Chicago Diner, a terrific vegan junkfood place. Their Reuben sandwich is to die for. Deliciously authentic but no actual meat or dairy. How do they do it? Don't tell me, I don't want to taint my infatuation with reality.

My new book is selling well and I'm getting lots of nice emails about it. I am gratified. I'm working on a graphic novel which I'd love to publish one day. Lots of work, not much time to dedicate to it, so don't hold your breath. Could be years.

The new book is called "Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro" and you can get it on Amazon or Budplant.com. Check it out, you'll be glad you did. Seriously. No really. Stop it, I'm not kidding.

I've been home for two weeks in a row and I really love it! I think I could live here.

Last week the wife and I visited the national headquarters of PETA. What an amazing organization. Astoundingly competent and efficient. An unbelievable list of accomplishments, moving heaven and earth on a daily basis, and all in the name of compassion. You've never met a more impressive group of talented and dedicated people, all working for peanuts. It's so gratifying to see an organization excell to that degree for something other than the almighty dollar. Maybe the human race isn't a lost cause after all.

Who am I kidding? It's a lost cause. Just pop into a Wal-mart sometime.

Back to reality, in 9 days I'm off to Dallas, Tulsa, and Chicago for the last three performances EVER of The Bizarro Baloney Show. It's been fun, but it's time to put away the puppets. Too much work, too much overhead, too much "fun fur." The end of the Baloney Show will be in Chicago, the night before the National Cartoonists Society's annual convention starts. Lots of my cartoon colleagues will be there. God, I hope they aren't too drunk to allow others to enjoy the show. I hate filing charges against my friends. But what the hell, I've done it before and I'll do it again.

And by "I suck" I mean that I'm a lousy bloggerizer. It's really hard for me to get around to blogging on a daily basis and without daily blog entries, who is going to get hooked on your blog? And come to think of it, what is the point of getting people hooked on your blog again? Told you I'm not very good at this.

Just got back from three weeks on the road with that damned comedy show and I swear I'll never do it again. I'm bone tired and am sporting somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 fewer IQ points as a result. The next three shows in Dallas, Tulsa, and Chicago at the end of the month will be my last ever. I'm hanging up my puppets.

For now, though, I'm home again and able to dig in on my backlog of work and such. But what do I find waiting for me when I arrived? A jury summons. I mean a GODDAM jury summons. Just the gasoline-drenching my inferno of a bad mood needed. So...jet-lagged and woefully behind on my work, I dragged my comedy-creating ass out of bed this morning and schlepped across Brooklyn to a dreary courthouse to sit in a room all day to repeatedly hear how lucky I am to be a part of the jury system and how swell it is that we no longer determine innocence and guilt by tying people up and throwing them in the water to see if they float. Yes, they use that analogy in the "don't be so pissed you've got jury duty today" video, narrated by 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley, no less. I wanted to tie him up and throw him in the water.

Praise the gods, I didn't get chosen for a jury or a pond-tossing, so I'm home now and trying to get back on deadline. Don't ever envy the new-idea-a-day-no-matter-what life of a syndicated cartoonist. Unless it's the sort that are embarrassingly rich and don't bother to do their own work anymore, like the Garfield guy. But then, with that kind of deal you lose your soul for all eternity, so it's a tradeoff.

Oh, what do I care? Envy it if you want to. I've got to get back to work.

Stream my interview live at 8AM PST today

I'll be on an NPRaffiliate in Berkeleyhttp://www.kpfa.org/morningshow/index.php