Saturday, April 21, 2007

Bizarro

Bizarro is a fictional character, a doppelganger of DC Comics’ Superman. Due to a somewhat disjointed continuity, several versions of Bizarro have appeared in DC comic books, all of them inversions of Superman with gray or chalk-white skin and a twisted sense of logic, which typically manifests itself as the superficial "opposite" of anything Superman would do or say, and the resultant speech pattern ("Me am going to kill you" would mean "I will save you" in Bizarro speech). Due to his imperfections, Bizarro is frequently a foe of Superman, but sometimes finds himself in the role of hero (in this case, an anti-hero).

The original Bizarro was created when Superman was exposed to a "duplicate ray." In accordance with the science fiction concepts of Superman stories of the era, Bizarro relocated to "the Bizarro world," a cubical planet called Htrae which operated under "Bizarro logic" (it was a crime to do anything good or right) and which Bizarro populated with inverted versions of Superman’s supporting cast and other DC heroes.

Bizarro and the Bizarro World have become somewhat well known in popular culture, and the term Bizarro is used as to describe anything that utilizes twisted logic or that is the opposite of something else. The television series Seinfeld, with its many Superman references and in-jokes, even devoted an episode to the Bizarro concept, "The Bizarro Jerry", with Elaine dating a mirror opposite of Jerry who had his own Bizarro versions of friends George, Kramer, and Newman. To complete the allusion, Kevin (the Bizarro Jerry character) even uses the peculiar way of speaking, ending the episode with "Me so happy; me want to cry" and has a statue of Bizarro in his apartment.

1 comment:

pete said...

As much as I like your entry, I gotta ask, how does Bizarro relate to Nebraska? Going through the lyrics, I didn't notice Bruce making a reference to Bizarro. If you refer to Bizarro in one of your entries, than that should probably be a footnote.