Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro shows us a budding balloon artist at the very beginning of his career, where he creates the simplest of balloon animals, before advancing to the balloon dog:

(#1) The raw material of balloon sculpture is cylindrical balloons, which can then be twisted and tied together; this trainee has the cylindrical balloons, but as yet has had no practice in manipulating them, so he offers for sale the unprocessed balloons, which the buyer just has to imagine as different roughly cylindrical animals — here an earthworm, here a snake, here (where we break up in laughter) a lowly nematode (most nematodes are tiny, less than 2.5 mm long) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

Balloons. A balloon is a flexible membrane bag that can be inflated with a gas. Starting with a bag, you get an object with a circular cross-section, either roughly spherical or roughly cylindrical (a meatball or a sausage).

There are spherical animals — pufferfish, or rolled-up creatures: hedgehog, pill bug / wood louse, armadillo — and a fair number of cylindrical animals, but a great many animals can be viewed abstractly as assemblages of mostly cylindrical elements, so that cylindrical balloons can be used to compose simulacra of the animals. But at such a level of abstraction that it can be hard to distinguish a balloon horse from a balloon dog.

Balloon sculpture can nevertheless take us well past the the plain cylinders of the clown in #1. And, kids, you can learn to do it! Here from Amazon.com is the pitch for the Learn & Climb DIY balloon animal kit:

(#2) Dog, mouse, giraffe, and more

THE ULTIMATE BALLOON ANIMAL KIT – The most comprehensive twisting balloon set available has all the balloon animal supplies needed! and it’s fun for all the family. We’ve made this set simple, easy to use and designed it for Fun. In this deluxe balloons for kids edition, we’ve included 100 professional balloons, double action pump and an easy to follow instruction manual.

This entry was posted on November 12, 2025 at 11:17 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Toys and games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.