Amazon.com Review
Dan Piraro, creator of the Klibanesque comic "Bizarro", takes an uncomfortable journey into the homes of his deranged and well-mannered fans. Because Piraro's publishing company refused to pay for a book tour for his most recent collection of cartoons, he came up with the potentially dangerous idea of contacting his fan base and asking them to send him plane tickets, drive him around, and let him stay in their homes. Before chronicling his adventures on the road, Piraro presents a painfully funny narration of his Catholic upbringing, describing nuns as women who "talk several times each day to invisible beings," and whose job it is to "teach heathen children the value of mindless complicity to authority." The second section of the book, where Piraro relates his travels among the comics fans, is less cruelly funny but nonetheless good reading. The stories of those who were kind enough to cart around a strange cartoonist are surprisingly touching. As an added bonus, the spirit of Wheel of Fortune's Pat Sajak serves as Piraro's guardian angel throughout his travels.
From Kirkus Reviews
A popular cartoonist decides to hit the road to promote the latest collection of his strips. The gimmick: Let the fans pay in full for the junket. Piraro, a cool kinda '90s guy, is the creator of the syndicated daily cartoon ``Bizarro.'' He went to the Internet to recruit the help of devoted fans, pleading electronically for meals, lodging, and transportation during his ten-city book tour. He put the byte, so to speak, on adventuresome readers from California to Florida (where, he notes, the ``humidity is such that you need only to take a deep breath to quench your thirst''). After downloading the whimsical story of his shy youth, Piraro describes the trip and the obliging folk who fell in with his scheme. Some ``Bizarro'' enthusiasts staked him to meals, some lent him a spare room, some hauled him to book signings, and others provided airplane tickets. His evident fondness for them notwithstanding, he makes many seem like fugitives from an Ed Wood movie. There are overly neat yuppies and aging hippies, scary guys and predatory females (let's hope he used impenetrable pseudonyms for some of his hosts). Strange is the operative norm in America, according to this comical moocher. His freewheeling fans apparently enjoyed his fey humor and put up with his threats of incontinence. The conceit that game-show host Pat Sajak is his fairy godfather, making ethereal appearances like Billie Burke advising Judy Garland, is a running gag that soon runs out of steam. His minuscule odyssey concludes with a truly bizarre confessional regarding unanticipated discord at home. Neither Kuralt nor Kerouac on the road, Piraro offers a sporadically funny tale of a freeloader's pilgrimage to fanland. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
