The Maltese Mackerel
Greetings from Bizarro Studios North.
As you've some to expect on a Saturday, we have a new blog entry posted for you, with cartoons, commentary, a pipe pic, and a bit of music.
It's been a productive week here in the studio, and we even gained a day on our publication deadline. This week's scribbles included a dog show, a visit to the doctor, a legendary lumberjack, extraterrestrials, a craft brewery, and a pair of cave dwellers.
Looking Ahead & Looking Back
Here are the cave folk mentioned above. They'll appear in Bizarro during the second week of March.
Our peek into the past is an artifact from my college days. My brother, who's two years younger than me, often inherited my used textbooks, since we attended the same school and were both enrolled in the engineering program. (He was a much better student than me.)
This week, while clearing out a storage area, he came across our old physics textbook. A bookplate pasted to the title page fell out; its glue long since evaporated, and revealed this cranky sentiment. My word balloon game was weak in those days, and I clearly didn't have an editor to catch my spelling errors.
Now Playing
While working on the latest cartoons, I was listening to this semi-legal CD reissue of the first two Kraftwerk albums, creatively titled Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2. Originally released in Germany in 1970 and 1972, they were issued in the UK in 1973 as a double album with the cover as shown above. These early recordings were quite different from their later output, beginning with 1974's Autobahn. On the two LPs collected here, the band employed mostly conventional instruments (drums, flute, electric guitar, electric bass, violin, and electric organs), which were often processed through primitive electronic devices. They also manipulated the resulting tapes to create hypnotic, atmospheric sounds.
In later years, the members of Kraftwerk seemed to be indifferent to these albums (and the third one, Ralf und Florian), and referred to them as "archaeology." Their pre-Autobahn records were never officially released on CD, although the band were aware of the many unauthorized reissues and largely ignored their existence.
I was heavily into early Kraftwerk, along with other experimental electronic musicians around the time that I was angrily defacing my textbooks, and this music still sounds fresh to me. Today, I wouldn't say that the science of physics is disgusting (or even "disguisting"); it's just over my head. I respect science, and admire the people who can grasp it in its more complicated forms.
The fact that this week I was listening to something I loved and was also reminded of something I hated at a particular period of my youth is one of those absurd coincidences the Universe likes to drop in our laps from time to time.
Click on the photo to hear "Ruckzuck" from Kraftwerk's first album.
Thank you for reading our comics, the blogs, and this sometimes-rambling newsletter. See you next week with another batch of cartoons and whatever else pops into my head.
All the best from your cartoonist,
Wayno
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