Archive for the ‘Comic conventions’ Category
March 13, 2025
The title of today’s Bizarro cartoon — a Psychiatrist cartoon, which will be incomprehensible to anyone who’s not up on American punk music, with a bare-chested, long-haired patient being asked by the therapist, “Can you tell me. Iggy, why you want to be a dog?”, a question that makes no sense unless you’re up on the lyrics of particular punk-rock songs; Wayno’s title for the cartoon is “Bark Therapy”, which is entertaining but not actually informative:
(#1) You really have to know about Iggy Pop (pictured on the couch) and his 1969 recording of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Iggy Pop has put in a brief appearance on this blog — in my 1/24/16 posting “Morning name: John Varvatos”, in a section on the proto-punk band Iggy and the Stooges (with a reference to “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), But now it’s time to say more.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
January 22, 2025
A Mark Thompson cartoon in the 1/20/25 issue of the New Yorker offers a foxy goulash of cultural forms: cartoon memes, joke forms, story formats, and conversational routines:
(#1) The Dog in Bar cartoon meme (with a fox instead of a dog), the Walk Into Bar joke form (a fox walks into a bar,…), the Fox Eludes Hound(s) story format, and the Tell Them I’m Not Here conversational routine
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Conversational formulas, Jokes, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Movies and tv, Narrative, Routines and rituals, Stories | 2 Comments »
December 24, 2024
🎄- 1: 12/24, Christmas Eve, and a cold rain’s a-fallin’. But along comes the New Yorker‘s 12/23/24 issue, the annual Cartoons and Puzzles issue, with a section on “cartoons about fine, good, and excellent dining to whet your appetite”, plus a full budget of cartoons sprinkled throughout the issue.
From all of which I’ve selected three memic cartoons:
–from the dining section, a comic turn on one of the great parody magnets of art
— then a Psychiatrist cartoon especially for the Christmas season
— and a Desert Island cartoon, which is at least about gift-giving
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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Parody | Leave a Comment »
November 16, 2024
Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:
Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’m, I had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language processing, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Possession, Psycholinguistics, Psychology, Singular & plural, Spelling, Style and register, Variation, Writing conventions | 1 Comment »
November 9, 2024
… and, instead of taking the Zzyzx exit, catches a ride with a guy in a SYZYGY car to the end of the road, where one-point perspective takes you (so we are both out in the desert in San Bernardino County CA; and also in the artist’s meta-world, where perspective lines converge in a vanishing point, and that is truly the end of the road). All this in yesterday’s Zippy strip, which is rich in Z, Y, ZY / ZI, and ZYG. plus the occasional antic X:
(#1) Three things: Zzyzx Road; one-point perspective; and the word SYZYGY (the ZYG of which took my mind to the word ZYGOTE; while the concept of syzygy took me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a wedding-feast of syzygy — of counterparts, contrasts, conflicts, and oppositions)
And then there’s zig; from NOAD:
noun zig: a sharp change of direction in a zigzag course: he went round and round in zigs and zags.
(which can then be verbed to yield to zig ‘to take a zig’, as in my title)
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Posted in Art, Assonance, Comic conventions, Etymology, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Names, Opposition, Placenames, Semantics, Spelling | 1 Comment »
October 17, 2024
… in yesterday’s (10/16) Bizarro (Wayno’s title: “Subaquatic Psychology Session”):
All about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set, but it’s way more complex than that, and the joke turns on one of those complexities (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
The relevant complexity becomes clear when you look at some explicit superlatives, in questions like these:
Who is the biggest? What is the best?
These are baffling out of context. Because they are consistent with so many different contexts. But these aren’t differences in what the questions mean; dictionaries wouldn’t have different entries for the many kinds of being the biggest or the best. In technical talk, the questions aren’t many-ways ambiguous, but are instead, neutral, or unspecified, with regard to the different kinds of being biggest or best.
It’s much the same for the implicit superlatives, in questions like:
Who is your favorite? What is my favorite?
There are so many kinds of favorite things (try not to think of The Sound of Music). Favorite places, favorite friends, favorite songs, and on and on. Favorite children and favorite foods, in the case of the cartoon. If your mom tells you you’re her favorite, and you’re a fish (of a race of talking fish, from CartoonWorld), then either of those is a genuine possibility — but of course maybe she’s saying you’re her favorite tennis partner or her favorite artistic swimmer or whatever. Neutrality all the way. (Though the more you know about the context, the narrower the range of understandings becomes.)
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Posted in Comic conventions, Context, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Pragmatics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2024
Complex ambiguities in the 9/25 comics: a Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange turning on the ambiguity of sham; and a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro turning on the ambiguity of tom:
(#1) sham conveying fraud, hence illegality; vs. sham for a decorative pillow cover (being manufactured in a small workshop, though note the suggestion in the title panel that the place might be a cover — ambiguity alert! — in the sense ‘an activity or organization used as a means of concealing an illegal or secret activity’ (NOAD) — but why are these pillow coverings called shams?
(#2) Personified, talking animals: two toms, a tomcat and a tom turkey, presented as characters named Tom, who work for the same company and are encountering one another over coffee, hence Wayno’s title “Breakroom Encounter” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Beheading, Comic conventions, Compounds, Conversion, Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Personification, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
September 11, 2024
It started with this rich (but baffling) painting on Pinterest a little while back:
(#1) A young boy, standing in a lake or river, holds up a fish he has caught on a line, while a band of intense light (a rocket launching?) shines from the far shore — a work by Irish figurative painter Conor Walton (born in 1970), who does still lifes and commissioned portraits, but also a lot of allegorical figurative painting, on mythological, cultural, and political themes
Some searching on Walton’s website identified #1 as Walton’s Phaethon (2015), so the subtext is mythological; comments to come. That search led to a clearly myth-based painting — a male nude to boot — showing Sisyphus. Then to a political / cultural painting featuring Vladimir Putin, except that it’s also about Slim Pickens’s character Major Kong in the movie Dr. Strangelove, and, yes, it’s another male nude. And finally to a monumentally complex painting on a cultural / political theme, Darwinian evolution.
There’s a lot more, but these four should give you a feel for Walton’s imaginative side.
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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Evolution, Language and animals, Language and religion, Language and the body, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »
August 10, 2024
From New Yorker bob (Bob Eckstein) — a regular visitor on this blog — in the West Side Rag (in NYC), as reproduced in his 8/9 newsletter The Bob, this charmingly absurdist cartoon:
(#1) Into an ordinary living room obtrudes one of the banes of urban street life, the often years-long scaffolding for construction projects — highlighted here by showing not just the scaffold structure of pipes, but also some green protective sheeting for the project (this in an otherwise b&w cartoon, so it’s shriekingly obtrusive)
Very roughly, cartoons and comics hinge on either word play (very commonly, punning) or the humor of situation. In turn, the humor of situation either comments on social, cultural, or political matters, or displays an absurdity — like surrealistic art, depicting discordant, inappropriate, ambivalent, or inexplicable elements of some situation, as if in a dream. And then, a lot of absurdos (absurdist cartoons) depict scenes that seem surreal because they unfold simultaneously in two different worlds, in what I’ll call an anchor world and an intrusive world.
The cartoon in #1 is a two-world absurdo. The anchor world is a modern middle-class living room, inhabited by three characters all sitting on comfortable furniture in the room: two women engaged in conversation about the third character, Harry, who’s engrossed in reading something. The trouble with Harry is that he’s covered in scaffolding, as in the intrusive world, a city street where construction is going on.
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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Surrealism | 1 Comment »
August 7, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which a prince grouses, over a tipple, about his amatory career, to a nobleman, one of his courtiers:
It seems the prince was once a frog and could rake in the chicks with nothing more than a few commanding ribbits; those were the days of easy scores (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
What do women want?, the princel wonders with a whine, recalling that once upon a time a short squat body, moist smooth skin, and long hind legs for leaping used to drive them into an osculatory frenzy. It’s all so damn unfair. (Wayno’s title for the cartoon: “Unhappy Ending”.)
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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Costumes, Folklore, Hats, Language and animals, Portmanteaus, Stories | Leave a Comment »
