Yesterday’s Zippy:
(#1)
This follows on the previous day’s posting on (among other things) manga eyes.
Archive for the ‘Cartoon conventions’ Category
manga/anime hair
December 17, 2015A query on comic conventions
June 24, 2015A query from regular reader Andy Sleeper on the 15th, about conventions in the comics. Andy reported on two cases where he’d seen flanking punctuation used to indicate that what was inside the punctuation was spoken in a language other than English. Andy wondered (a) whether this was an established practice in comics, and (b) whether artists have tried to use other means to solve this problem in their work.
I have to confess that I don’t know the answer to either of these questions, though I’ve spent some time looking around. So now I throw the questions open to the world, hoping that someone will know things I don’t.
Thought balloons
June 23, 2015In the July 2015 Funny Times (p. 10), a cartoon about cartoon conventions, which I’ll have to describe to you rather than show to you (for reasons I’ll explain).
It shows a man standing by a sidewalk in a park, offering balloons for sale. The placard next to him says
THOUGHT
BALLOONS
75¢
And the balloons are labeled:
NOW WHAT?
WHAT’S FOR DINNER?
LIFE IS STRANGE
LIVE IN THE MOMENT
BE HAPPY!
each supplying a thought.
Obscenicons
June 13, 2015Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Ralph understands what symbols are, and even that in this context only symbols that aren’t alphanumerics count, but he hasn’t figured out that obscenicons are a conventional subset of these symbols.
Background on this blog in “The obscenicons vs. the grawlixes” of 8/1/10. Obscenicons are frequently discussed (as well as used) in cartoons; among the many examples on Language Log and this blog are a Zits and a Bizarro in this posting.
Miss Peach
March 14, 2015In response to my Zippy posting earlier today in which I looked for the source of the strip’s title, “Peachy Keen”, Drew Smith suggested that the peach part came from the strip Miss Peach rather than (my suggestion) the game character Princess Peach. At issue was the model or models for a grotesquely big-headed character in the Zippy. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but now I see that Miss Peach seems not to have come up on this blog, so it would be worth discussing.
From cute to creepy
March 14, 2015Today’s Zippy:
(#1)
The strip is both entertaining and instructive on its own, but then Bill Griffith would be unlikely to just invent a creepy cartoon character. And then there’s the title, “Peachy Keen”.
More cartoonization
March 10, 2015Today’s Zippy, another exercise in cartoonization, a transformation of an image (in this case, Magritte’s Le therapeute) by stages into a Zippy scene:
(#1)
The Magritte original:
(#2)
Meta-talk
March 6, 2015From the March 3rd webcomic Sheldon, A conversation between Arthur the talking duck and a character in the comic, a garrulous stereotypical Frenchman, negotiating the character’s getting off the strip so that the business of the strip can move on:
cartoonosity
January 20, 2015Today’s Zippy, with a cartoon transformation:
The three Dingburgers admiring Little Zippy (already cartoon characters) become more and more like cartoon characters, more cartoonish, more cartoony: bigger eyes, bigger ears, longer noses.