Tales Of The Bizarro World

Posted: Sunday, September 3
By: Rich Morrissey

Writer: Jerry Siegel
Artists: John Forte (1st story pencilled by Wayne Boring)

Publisher: DC

Plot: This TPB reprints DC's wacky sixties series set on the Bizarro World, a square planet inhabited by imperfect doubles of Superman and his friends who do everything backwards.

Tales of the Bizarro World took over the second half of Adventure Comics in 1961. Displacing Aquaman and Congorilla, the Bizarros and their wacky antics held sway in that spot for a little over a year. They lived by the Bizarro Code: "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!"

This series marks the introduction of Bizarro versions of most of Superman's other friends like Krypto, Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, Lucy Lane, and Lana Lang. Not to mention several enemies including Mr. Mxyzptlk, Lex Luthor, and Titano the Super-Ape - all, naturally, saccharine good guys.

In the course of the series, writer Jerry Siegel and artist John Forte delightfully parodied almost every genre in the business - including monster movies, alien invasions, Boy Scouts, Westerns, TV shows ("Perry Mason" and "Car 54, Where Are You?" the only stories that particularly date the series). World history was not spared (Bizarro dreams he changes history so Isaac Newton invents the Fig Newton; the sort of early product placement of which Mort Weisinger was a master), nor were the cliches of the Superman comics of the Weisinger era themselves spared. A classic cover had Bizarro #1 attempting to take on the secret identity of Bizarro-Clark Kent, only to be spotted on his first day. "How you guess me am really Bizarro #1?" asks the bewildered Bizarro-Clark, nervously rubbing his omnipresent BIZARRO #1 medallion.

As Jerry Seinfeld's writer David Mandel points out in his excellent introduction, this series defined the concept of a place where everything is done backwards for all time, and "Bizarro" has become a literal part of the English language - among many other things, it's the title of a newspaper panel by Dan Piraro with no connection to DC.

Occasionally writer Siegel slipped up in his otherwise impeccable logic. In one story, Jimmy Olsen is brought from Earth and forced to earn his living on the Bizarro version of the Daily Planet, where an alien invasion only gets a filler on page 64, but "Dog Bites Man" is a headline. Then Bizarro-Lois asks Jimmy to take her to lunch...when, of course, she really should have taken HIM to lunch, with the usual footnote or thought-balloon that "On the Bizarro World, women ask men on dates". As Weisinger's one-time assistant Nelson Bridwell used to say, even the Bizarros' imperfections were imperfect!

The Bizarro series was dropped from Adventure Comics with #300, and they fell back to being irregular guest-stars. After Weisinger's retirement, were rarely seen at all. On their occasional re-appearances, writers ranging from Martin Pasko to John Byrne would attempt to recapture the first Bizarro's original tragic aspects, with a certain degree of success.

But Bizarro truly worked best, at least on a regular basis, in his own milieu, his own world...and never better than in these delightful and classic stories.