Have you ever wandered into a conversation of people who are in a very specific or specialized field and wondered what language they are speaking? And yet, you are very curious anyway? That was my impression as I read The Lexicon of Comicana by Mort Walker (he, of Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois comic strip fame).
It was fun to read and to think about the ways in which Walker, and other comic strip makers, have created their own vocabulary for things they do in the world of comic book making. Words like Briffits, and Plewds, and Grawlixes, and Mayhemia all surface, and this book is a light-hearted tome, too, with Walker having fun with the concepts and with us, the reader, as he adds jokes and pratfalls and other visual elements to his explorations of Emanata and beyond.
Famous comic creator Chris Ware offers up the foreword, and talks about how an earlier edition of this book — which is mostly in the form of cartoons and comics, with some adjacent prose — made its rounds through the worlds of cartoonists and graphic novelists in his early, formative years, transforming the way they talked about their art.
This edition that I read is a reprint, and I am happy to have stumbled across it, to know that even academic materials from the world of comics is accessible and fun to read.
Peace (in panels),
Kevin