BLONDIE, PEANTS, ASTERIX AND OTHERS

A few years back I had written about Ramu Salivati, my roommate in the YMCA Hostel on Chowrighree Road, Calcutta in the early 1970s. It was his copy of The Lexicon of Comicana by Mort Walker that I borrowed and read with abiding interest. Till I read it, the only words I knew about the grammar of cartoons was balloons – the bubble in which the words spoken by a character are written. A slender volume – just about 100 pages, give or take ten – with several cartoons occupying a major part of many pages, it familiarized me with terms like plewds, sphericasia, grawlixes and squeans. 

The other day I chanced upon a pdf version of the charming little book. It brought all those words back – and many more that I had forgotten.

The author is no mean person: he is the creator of popular comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. In this book, he attempts taxonomy of cartoons and the symbols used in comic strips around the world. I would not say that these are sophisticated examples of evolved cartoons. But after reading The Lexicon, one tends to appreciate his comic strips more.

For a lay reader like me, The Lexicon of Comicana‘s principal charm is that it lays out a series of cartooning phenomena that you’ve probably never thought too hard about, gives them funny, onomatopoeic names, and then lays out examples of how your favorite comic strip might use them.

For example, take emanata. These are symbols that emanate outwards from cartoon characters to show their internal state. Then there are plewds, the drops of sweat that spray outwards from a cartoon character under emotional distress. Squeans are what you see above the heads of inebriated characters. If that squean is accompanied by a spurl, it means he has drunk himself silly.

When Sarge punches Beetle Bailey, it is made up of three elements: briffit (the little cloud of dust to show where the punch started), swalloop (the arc of the fist as it smashes across Beetle’s jaw) and whitope (the point where the fist lands). Briffits are most often accompanied by hites: horizontal lines representing speed. There are also uphites and downhites, which come out of a character when he is jumping or falling. Agitrons indicate the movement caused by shaking something hard. The general term for all these lines drawn to show movement is a sphericasia.

There is also the indotherm, a squiggly line that might drift out of a cup of coffee to show that it is hot. And the waftatron, the wisp of stream that comes from a lip-smacking pie to show that it smells good.

Going back to balloons, Walker refers to them as fumetti (which is Italian for “balloon”). Soliloquies and thoughts are represented cumulus fumetti while conversation from the other end of a phone are called “AT&T fumetti“ suggesting that the voice is being relayed electronically. For yelling, you use the ‘Boom!’ fumetti, where the contours of the balloon are drawn in spikes.

When a character has this irrepressible urge to say cusswords, he is expected to self-censor and use the bizarre iconography of maladicta. It is made up of jarns, quimps, nittles, and grawlixes. Quimps are  astrological symbols, jarns are different types of spirals, nittles are bursting stars, and grawlixes are squiggly lines that represent ostensibly obliterated epithets. The cartoonist often mixes them to reflect the level of profanity he wants.

This is all a lot of fun, of course, and at the end of the day, the grammar, taxonomy, and classification of cartoon symbols with which The Lexicon of Comicana concerns itself might seem like a bunch of tongue-in-cheek silliness. That’s because it really is!