The Lexicon of Comicana

The Lexicon of Comicana is a 1980 book by the American cartoonist Mort Walker. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the devices used by cartoonists. In it, Walker invented an international set of symbols called symbolia after researching cartoons around the world. In 1964, Walker had written an article called "Let's Get Down to Grawlixes", a satirical piece for the National Cartoonists Society. He used terms such as grawlixes for his own amusement, but they soon began to catch on and acquired an unexpected validity. The Lexicon was written in response to this.

The Lexicon of Comicana
Front cover art
AuthorMort Walker
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectReference
PublisheriUniverse (2000)
Publication date
1980, 2000
Media typePrint
Pages108
ISBN0-595-08902-X

The names he invented for them sometimes appear in dictionaries, and serve as convenient terminology occasionally used by cartoonists and critics. A 2001 gallery showing of comic- and street-influenced art in San Francisco, for example, was called "Plewds! Squeans! and Spurls!"[1]

Examples
  • Agitrons: wiggly lines around a shaking object or character
  • Blurgits, swalloops: curved lines preceding or trailing after a character's moving limbs
  • Briffits: clouds of dust that hang in the wake of a swiftly departing character or object
  • Dites: diagonal, straight lines drawn across flat, clear and reflective surfaces, such as windows and mirrors
  • Emanata: lines drawn around the head to indicate shock or surprise
  • Grawlixes: typographical symbols standing in for profanities, appearing in dialogue balloons in place of actual dialogue[2]
  • Hites: horizontal straight lines trailing after something moving with great speed; or, drawn on something indicating reflectivity (puddle, glass, mirror)
  • Indotherm: wavy, rising lines used to represent steam or heat
  • Lucaflect: a shiny spot on a surface of something, depicted as a four-paned window shape
  • Plewds: flying sweat droplets that appear around a character's head when working hard, stressed, etc.
  • Quimps: planets resembling Saturn, used to replace obscenities
  • Solrads: radiating lines drawn from something luminous like a lightbulb or the sun
  • Squeans: little starbursts or circles that signify intoxication, dizziness, or sickness
  • Vites: vertical straight lines indicating reflectivity (compare dites, hites)

Additional symbolia terms include whiteope, sphericasia, that-a-tron, spurls, oculama, crottles, maledicta balloons, farkles, doozex, staggeration, boozex, digitrons, nittles, waftaroms, and jarns.

gollark: The string metatable code is not in skynet.
gollark: No.
gollark: It works, somehow.
gollark: Anyway, basically, potatOS syncs the metatable to a random cloud JSON host.
gollark: It took lots of work, but it does support string metatables, a bit.

See also

References
  1. “Plewds! Squeams! and Spurls!”; published November 29, 2001; retrieved June 4, 2018
  2. "Language Log » Obscenicons a century ago". Languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu. Retrieved 30 December 2017.

Bibliography
  • Steve Edgell, Tim Pilcher, Brad Brooks, The Complete Cartooning Course: Principles, Practices, Techniques (London: Barron's, 2001), pp. 50–51, ISBN 978-0764113185
  • Media related to Grawlixes at Wikimedia Commons
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.