Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
April 17, 2023
Well, the title pretty much gives the joke away. An outrageous (but phonologically perfect) pun in a Bizarro cartoon from 9/6/12:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just 1 in this strip — see this Page.)
What the woman and her two kids get to view is Disney on ice —
(the body of the dead-since-1966 Walt) Disney (resting) on (a block of preservative) ice (in a display case)
What she bought tickets to was an entertainment (especially aimed at children) called Disney on Ice —
(an entertainment in which characters from the Walt) Disney (Company’s animated cartoons are portrayed by performers skating) on ice
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Posted in Ambiguity, Common vs. proper, Context, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Puns, Reference, Relevance | 4 Comments »
April 13, 2023
From a comic book of my childhood, Weird Science #8 (July 1951):
(#1) In the story “Seeds of Jupiter” (Bill Gaines, writer; Al Feldstein, inks and pencils) — posted on 4/12 by Tim Evanson on Facebook
The panel evokes (at least) two themes from philosophy, literature, and popular culture:
— the Ungodly Knowledge theme — there are things we were not meant to know — the products of which are then inadvertently released onto the world; the prototype is the story of the monster created by Victor Frankenstein
— the Beast Within theme — we are both good and evil, a beast lurks within us — related to the larger theme of transformation into a monster (a werewolf, a vampire, whatever); the prototype is the story of the monstrous Mr. Hyde, released in the lab from within Dr. Jekyll and then onto the world
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Posted in Art, Books, Linguistics in the comics, Literature, Movies and tv, Philosophy, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
April 8, 2023
… on the occasion of her being among the winners of 2023 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced on 4/5. From the list:
in General Nonfiction: Liana Finck, Writer, Brooklyn, New York; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of English, Barnard College
LF came to me first as the creator of extraordinary cartoons for The New Yorker magazine; there is a Page on this blog devoted to my postings about these cartoons. But there’s lots more, some of which I’ll cover below, in a somewhat haphazard look at her career. I’ll start with an appreciation of one of her NYer cartoons, in one of these postings, from 10/31/17: “Three kinds of cartoon”:
(#1) Liana Finck in the 5/8/17 New Yorker: two worlds intersect on the street
Christian evangelism meets recycling. To understand Finck’s cartoon … , you need to recognize the formula “Have you heard the good news?” as part of a routine of public evangelism, especially by Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, going door to door or appealing to people in public places, including on the street. In an expanded form:
Have you heard the good news (about (our Lord) Jesus Christ)? (He is/has risen (from the grave).)
You also need to recognize the two characters in the cartoon as plastic water bottles — not at all difficult — and — more difficult — also recognize the symbol
(#2)
as a symbol of recycling, and in addition understand that “recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects” (Wikipedia). That is, in recycling, material metaphorically dies (when it is discarded) and then, if recycled, is reborn — metaphorically rises from the dead.
If you’ve got all that, you can appreciate the cleverness in having evangelical water bottles spreading the good news about how water bottles have been resurrected (via the miracle of recycling).
About LF. A portrait of the artist (born 1986):
(#3) photo: Ilya S. Savenok
Meanwhile, some details of her work on her home page. Among her projects is an advice column, Dear Pepper, maintained on her Instagram page. A recent notice from her there:
(#4)
And then the books.
— from Amazon.com on A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York by Liana Finck (Ecco paperback, 2014); publisher’s blurb:
In an illustrative style that is a thrilling mash-up of Art Spiegelman’s deft emotionality, Roz Chast’s hilarious neuroses, and the magical spirit of Marc Chagall, A Bintel Brief is Liana Finck’s evocative, elegiac love letter to the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants who transformed New York City and America itself.
A Bintel Brief “A Bundle of Letters” — was the enormously popular advice column of The Forward, the widely read Yiddish language newspaper begun in 1906 New York. Written by a diverse community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, these letters spoke to the daily heartbreaks and comedies of their new lives, capturing the hope, isolation, and confusion of assimilation.
Drawn from these letters — selected and adapted by Liana Finck and brought to life in her appealing two-color illustrations — A Bintel Brief is a tour of Lower East Side New York, and includes an imaginative conversation with the Yiddish “Dear Abby,” Abraham Cahan, The Forward’s legendary editor and creator of the Bintel Brief column.
From premarital sex to family politics to struggles with jobs and money, A Bintel Brief is an enlightening look at a segment of America’s rich cultural past that offers fresh insights for our own lives as well.
— on Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir by Liana Finck (Penguin Random House, 2018), the publisher’s blurb from their site:
In this achingly beautiful graphic memoir, Liana Finck goes in search of that thing she has lost — her shadow, she calls it, but one might also think of it as the “otherness” or “strangeness” that has defined her since birth, that part of her that has always made her feel as though she is living in exile from the world. In Passing for Human, Finck is on a quest for self-understanding and self-acceptance, and along the way she seeks to answer some eternal questions: What makes us whole? What parts of ourselves do we hide or ignore or chase away — because they’re embarrassing, or inconvenient, or just plain weird — and at what cost?
Passing for Human is what Finck calls “a neurological coming-of-age story” — one in which, through her childhood, human connection proved elusive and her most enduring relationships were with plants and rocks and imaginary friends; in which her mother was an artist whose creative life had been stifled by an unhappy first marriage and a deeply sexist society that seemed expressly designed to snuff out creativity in women; in which her father was a doctor who struggled in secret with the guilt of having passed his own form of otherness on to his daughter; and in which, as an adult, Finck finally finds her shadow again — and, with it, her true self.
Melancholy and funny, personal and surreal, Passing for Human is a profound exploration of identity by one of the most talented young comic artists working today. Part magical odyssey, part feminist creation myth, this memoir is, most of all, an extraordinary, moving meditation on what it means to be an artist and a woman grappling with the desire to pass for human.
— Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self by Liana Finck (Penguin Random House, 2019): over 500 cartoons from Instagram and The New Yorker
— on Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation by Liana Finck (Penguin Random House, 2022), the publisher’s blurb from their site:
(#5) The book cover
In this ambitious and transcendent graphic novel, Liana Finck turns her keen eye to none other than the Old Testament, reimagining the story of Genesis with God as a woman, Abraham as a resident of New York City, and Rebekah as a robot, among many other delightful twists. In Finck’s retelling, the millennia-old stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob and Esau haunt the pages like familiar but partially forgotten nursery rhymes ― transmuted by time but still deeply resonant. With her trademark insightfulness, wry humor, and supple, moving visual style, Finck accentuates the latent sweetness and timeless wisdom of the original text, infusing it with wit and whimsy while retaining every ounce of its spiritual heft.
Let There Be Light is proof that old stories can live forever, whether as ancient scripture or as a series of profound and enchanting cartoons. The Book of Genesis is about some of the most fundamental, eternally pertinent questions that we can ask: What does it mean to be human? What is the purpose of our lives? And how should we treat one another? The stories that attempt to answer these questions are an immediate link with the people who first told them. Unable to fathom the holiness and preciousness of that notion, or put it into words, Finck set out to depict it. The result is a true story of creation, rendered by one of our most innovative creators.
Finale. Finck’s quirky sense of humor on display in a NYer cartoon from 2/25/13 exploiting the characteristics of the Slinky toy and the habits of the salmon:
(#6)
Posted in Awards, Books, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
April 2, 2023
… in marble and bronze: a continuation of yesterday’s “Two bronze Orpheuses”, which began with the fate of Michelangelo’s marble David in Florida, where high school students must be shielded from viewing the statue’s penis. Australian cartoonist Cathy Wilcox’s savage take on that situation:
(#1) Wilcox’s “American Obscenity” cartoon (from the Sydney Morning Herald)
From here, even disregarding the American obsessive prudery about the human body, the topic goes off in many different directions. I’ll ramble through these in no particular order, starting with a digression on Wilcox, who’s new to this blog.
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Posted in Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Myths, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
April 1, 2023
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of April, and that’s no joke. Today’s topic is the depiction of the god Orpheus in two bronze statues, one in the UK, one in the US.
More specifically, it’s about the treatment of Orpheus’s genitals in the two statues, reflecting a (sub)cultural difference between the US (where a strain of fundangelical belief holds that the naked human body, especially the male body, is unclean and dangerous, especially to children and women, who therefore must be elaborately protected from viewing it) and essentially the rest of what might referred to in shorthand as western civilization (where norms of privacy and modesty hold sway, but artistic representations of the naked body have their place, even in public parks and gardens).
This posting was provoked by, first, a complex case in Florida involving a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David shown to a high-school class; and then the ensuing photo of one of the Orpheuses — from the UK — on Facebook. There’s a lot more, but I’m unable to finish this posting today, so I’ll just give you the teaser materials here. More to come
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Posted in Art, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »
March 30, 2023
I spare you the details of what these Pacific “bomb cyclone” weather events do to my body when it encounters the very low air pressure that accompanies them, but it’s extremely unpleasant and totally immobilizing (and this time, it included the inability to focus my eyes, so I couldn’t read anything for, like, four hours). That was yesterday; surviving this attack comes with slow recovery over some days. I had an “easy” entertaining posting in preparation, mostly replays from the past, so this is what I’m giving you now, just as proof that I’m not (quite) dead yet.
The occasion is yesterday’s (3/29) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, set in a little spheniscid restaurant:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Just Like Mom Used to Spew” (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Crude spew from Wayno, technical regurgitate in the cartoon text. Both references to penguins feeding their chicks. So: some comments on these practices. Then on to the restaurant — with all the accoutrements of a little neighborhood place — serving homey specialties, by penguins, for penguins.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
March 26, 2023
“Is this strip a rerun? It looks familiar”, Mike Doonesbury says to his wife Kim (Rosenthal) in the final panel of today’s (3/26/23) Doonesbury strip — in which Mike and Kim savage a (mock) Prevagen commercial they are watching on tv. And it’s an inside joke, because this Doonesbury strip is in fact a (slightly altered) rerun of the one from 2/14/21, which I wrote about in my 2/15/21 posting “The brain health product”. So Kim responds, in today’s (meta-)strip: “Wow. Good recall! No Prevagen for you!”
As I wrote in the 2021 posting, in the mock commercial,
the dietary supplement is openly hawked as a useless (but expensive) placebo for treating mild forgetfulness (with a digression in the 5th panel on a secret ingredient in it derived from the fabulously memorious jellyfish)
And the final panel of that strip Mike asks (echoing the commercial): “Are placebos right for us? I forget.” To which Kim replies: “If they come in gummies, I’m down with gummies.”
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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, My life | 3 Comments »
March 23, 2023
Today’s morning names: notions in the sense ‘cheap, useful articles (especially for the household)’ (and then later specializations to sewing materials); which suggested novelties in the sense ‘small, inexpensive, ornamental items’; and curios ‘rare, unusual, or intriguing objects’. All three concrete plural nouns arise from abstract nouns: notion ‘impulse or disposition to act’; novelty ‘newness, originality’; and curiosity ‘desire to know or learn things’.
I’ll consider the three concrete plurals in succession. I’m hoping that there’s some literature on the historical development of notions, but, given my very limited search abilities I haven’t been able to discover any of it.
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Posted in Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Morning names, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
March 21, 2023
In yesterday’s (3/20) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a cowboy — call him FM — bellies up to the bar in a saloon in the fabled Old West:
(#1) Though he’s wearing jeans and a handsome Western dress shirt, FM’s greenish pallor, eccentric hair, and neck bolt mark him as an outsider, not from these parts, not from around here; meanwhile, FM is a composite being, cobbled together from random parts — bodyparts — by Victor Frankenstein (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
So there’s parts and there’s parts. And FM’s from parts unknown is a parts ‘bodyparts’ pun on the model of parts ‘places’ in what is now a rather formal and poetical expression from parts unknown ‘coming from an unknown place’. The Frankenstein world superimposed, absurdly, on the Gunslinger world.
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Posted in Books, Clothing, Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Style and register | 2 Comments »
March 19, 2023
Phrasal Overlap Portmanteau time, starting with one from yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which is (by accident) regrettably topical; and going on to a more complex one from cartoonist Leigh Rubin’s Rubes strip back in 2016 — complex because Rubin probably was thinking of the joke as a cute pun (I told you it was complex).
But first, yesterday’s Bizarro:
(#1) Drag queen meets legendary lumberjack: the POP RuPaul Bunyan = RuPaul + Paul Bunyan (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Abbreviation, Beheading, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
