A Sunday Dan Piraro Bizarro, a little René Magritte festival that doesn’t actually mention the Belgian surrealist, but just assumes everyone recognizes the three paintings the cartoon alludes to:
Framed as a police lineup to identity a malefactor (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page)
The three paintings (with names in English translation) alluded to (all discussed in previous postings on this blog):
— The Treachery of Images: “This is not a pipe” (the “phony pipe” of the cartoon) — the Magrittean disavowal, for which there is a Page on this blog
— The Son of Man: the green-apple-face man (#5 in the lineup; the police have supplied the other four with green apples to resemble him)
— Golconda: bowler-hatted men raining from the sky (alluded to by the rain of objects in the first, title, panel of the cartoon)
If you don’t know the first two of these, the cartoon is incomprehensible.
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