About Dan Piraro
Dan Piraro is indisputably one of the best cartoonists currently playing the game. Piraro’s daily Bizarro is like fresh air compared to the rest of most comics pages — it’s surreal, opinionated, and consistently funny.— The Onion
Dan Piraro was born in the middle of the country in the middle of the 20th century. He escaped both as soon as he could.
BIZARRO was first syndicated in 1985 and has since then built a steady and loyal following on four continents. It currently appears daily in around 250 markets in North and South America, Europe and Asia.
Eleven collections of BIZARRO cartoons have been published as well as a book of prose, Bizarro Among the Savages, in which Piraro recounts his surreal book tour across the country, which was entirely funded by his readers, and during which he stayed in the homes of oddball fans.
Piraro is a popular speaker for groups of all kinds and works as an activist for animal welfare, public health, and environmental concerns. For his animal welfare themed cartoons he was awarded the Humane Society’s Genesis Award for Outstanding Cartoonist in 2002, 2003, and 2005.
BIZARRO has won an unprecedented three consecutive Reuben Awards from the National Cartoonist Society for “Best Cartoon Panel of the Year,” in 1999, 2000, and 2001. For the years 2002 to the present, Piraro has been nominated for its highest award, “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.”
Piraro’s one-man stage show, “The Bizarro Baloney Show,” is a multi-media performance featuring stand-up comedy, original songs, puppets, cartoons, animation, audience participation, video and onstage improv drawings. Since 2002, it has toured select cities and recently played to standing room-only houses at the New York International Fringe Festival, and won the festival’s Best Solo Show award. The New York Times called it “a shrewd tour of an artist's imagination...wildly applauded.”
During the months preceding the 2004 election, Piraro toured the country with three other stand-up comedians in a show called “Bizarro's PolitiComedy-A-Go-Go.” Billed as a left-wing Bushbashing comedy show, it was performed thirty-six times in twenty-nine cities between April and Election Day. The tour followed the publication of his political satire, The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) in which Dickey, Rummy and Dubya buy their way into the White House and make their rich friends richer while destroying everything in their path and chasing various Big Bad Wolfs around the globe.
In 2006, America’s premier art book publisher, Abrams Books, published Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro, a two hundred page retrospective of his career. The book includes images from his cartoons, fine art, commercial illustration, sketchbooks, and comedy shows, as well as a lengthy and humorous autobiographical essay.
Dan Piraro 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.
All of his closest friends think he’s a swell guy.
