Cartoons have been coming my way in an avalanche recently. Here are five for New Year’s Eve Eve, from four different sources (there are two Zippys) and on four different themes (there are two featuring the Grim Reaper).
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Five cartoons for the penultimate day
December 30, 2015King of comics
December 28, 2015An appreciative book notice. In my mail yesterday: King of the Comics: 100 Years of King Features (published 10/15), a huge, big-format, heavy book:
Oil paintings in miniature
December 28, 2015Another Xmas present: I Am Yours, by Joe Park, a collection of postcard versions of Park’s surreal (sometimes playful, often disturbing) oil paintings. Another one of those genres/styles (often featured on this blog) that leads us to ask: Is it art? Or wordless cartooning? Or what?
The sounds don’t quite match
December 26, 2015Two Christmas cartoons involving puns — one very close, one pretty distant. A Scott Metzger cartoon (which came to me through the Tysonism page on Facebook) and the Mother Goose and Grimm of 12/20/11 (which came to me though the King Features site):
(#1)
(#2)
From sadistic she-penguin convicts to wolves invading Britain
December 26, 2015A trail of books (and illustrations). It starts with a book I got for Christmas, Janet Perlman’s graphic novel Penguins Behind Bars. That leads to writer, artist, and illustrator Edward Gorey and his unsettling narratives. And from there to author Joan Aiken and her Wolves Chronicles (where we will get a note of linguistic interest).
Gorey is the connective tissue. Together with Derek Lamb, Perlman did the animation for the PBS Mystery! series, bringing drawings by Gorey to life. And then Gorey did cover illustrations for some of Aiken’s most famous books.
Two Dilberts
December 21, 2015From the 8th, featuring Alice:
(#1)
and from the 20th, featuring Wally and the pointy-haired boss:
(#2)
Ocus
December 21, 2015The Rhymes With Orange from the 19th, with a play on -ocus words:
And the place where the group meets is the Hocus Pocus Focus Locus. And the flower that blooms in that place is the Hocus Pocus Focus Locus Crocus.
Four from Leigh Rubin
December 20, 2015From Mike Pope recently, a link to this Leigh Rubin cartoon:
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The cartoon takes the metaphorical idiom in American English in the doghouse ‘in a situation in which someone is angry at you for something you did or did not do’ (Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary) and literalizes it, treats it literally.
Three more Rubin cartoons playing with language:
Odds and ends 12/20/15
December 20, 2015(There’s some gay sex stuff in the last section, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Four items that have come my way recently, all with some language play in them. Two are Christmas-related: a Green Eggs and Ham tie and a Rhymes With Orange cartoon. One has a jokey wine label. One has a wonderful invented name for a gay pornstar (and that leads to Arab characters in gay porn).
Know your eels
December 18, 2015From Facebook friends, this cute cartoon by Wayno:
(#1)
The composites electric eel and electric guitar, both with the pseudo-adjective electric, but in two different senses. Then there’s electric guitar vs. the retronym acoustic guitar (for what, until the introduction of electric guitars, was known simply as a guitar). Then
electric guitar : acoustic guitar :: electric eel : X
and X is acoustic eel.