In the wake of rage against emoticons, Beckettian bafflement from cartoonist Benjamin Schwartz in the latest (June 23rd) New Yorker:
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
More on the emoticon watch
June 20, 2014More octothorpe wrangling
June 20, 2014In the previous round, this Mother Goose and Grimm (#4 here) on pound sign, hashtag, etc. And now a Zits on the subject, with a family argument, lined up by generation:
Rage against the emoticon
June 17, 2014Today’s Bizarro:
Sometimes your patience just wears out.
Chuck Jones
June 15, 2014On Facebook, this Looney Tune pair offered by Roy Calfas:
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The War Between Bugs and Daffy. The creations of animator Chuck Jones.
Noir 1949
June 14, 2014The Zippy from the 11th takes Zippy back, in a Pontiac, to a cinematic 1949:
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The film noir movies in question (from that year) are, in order, The Big Steal and Cover Up. And the first features one of the major figures of film noir, the icon of masculinity Robert Mitchum:
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American film actor, author, composer and singer. … Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. (Wikipedia link)
Architectural notes
June 13, 2014Today’s Zippy:
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cornice, soffit, fascia, frieze board, dentil — technical terms of architecture that get Zippy off (so much so that he uses soffit, fascia, frieze board as a mantra).
Book notice: Visual Language of Comics
June 11, 2014Arrived yesterday, Neil Cohn’s The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images (Bloomsbury, 2013). Central thesis:
drawings and sequential images are structured in a similar way to language … comics are written in a visual language of sequential images that combines with text.
(Blurbs from linguists Ray Jackendoff and Dan Slobin.)
I haven’t read the book yet (though I find the thesis congenial), but the very first sentence (in the Introduction, p. xv) is of linguistic interest.
Assorted cartoons
June 7, 2014A recent accumulation: a Scott Hilburn strip with a pun; a Zits on X-free foods; a very meta Zippy; and a Pearls Before Swine with heavy use of implicature.