Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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Santa smokes Turkish

December 25, 2022

(There will be plain talk, in street language, about sexual acts, so this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

From Richard Hershberger (passed on to me by David Kathman), this 1920 magazine ad:


(#1) Hershberger’s comment: Run a Google image search on “Santa Claus cigarette” and a startling number of results pop up. This one is my favorite, as Santa clearly is taking a smoke while in the afterglow.

Things to talk about: postorgasmic afterglow; Turkish tobacco; Murad cigarettes; the ad campaign for the cigarettes by Rea Irvin; graphic artist Rea Irvin. First the sex, then the smokes — starting with the tobacco, in a chain of topics where each leads to the next.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Shelf elves at play

December 23, 2022

Following on yesterday’s “Elfshelfisms” posting, on The Elf on the Shelf book and the scout-elf toy and on elf on a shelf visual riddling (lemur on a femur etc.),  brief adventures of shelf elves at play: in the Nasty Elf genre of playful folk depictions of scout elves posed doing nasty, gross, and raunchy things (depictions passed around on the net the way variants of a joke form are passed around by word of mouth); and in human ShelfElfin figures engaged in similar play (specifically in soft porn, those naughty hunky boys).

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Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

Beneath a green auroral sky

December 18, 2022

… the Christmas penguins embrace:


(#1) In the sky, the green shimmer of an aurora; on the ground, a parent penguin nurtures their young one (in a green knitted cap)

The image comes to me from Joel Levin (one of the most faithful readers of this blog) for my collection of penguiniana. It came to him in a corporate holiday card from Fidelity Investments, where its visual message of parental care was sandwiched between conventional holiday greetings:

Wishing you a magical holiday

[Fidelity Penguin gif]

Here’s to all the good things the season brings.

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Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Penguins, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

Snoopy in a spiked collar

December 16, 2022

A very brief note on masculinity, today drawing on an old Peanuts cartoon (Jeff Bowles re-runs them for us every day):


A new collar, presumed to project aggressiveness via its fierce spikes, with aggressiveness then understood as a mark of masculinity — but Snoopy’s a happy dog, not a fierce dog, and that suits him

Two things.

Thing 1: spiked collars for dogs are not necessarily a sign of an aggressive dog, but are used to protect dogs from throat-biting attacks from predators and aggressive other dogs. Sweet dogs get spiked collars if they travel in bad neighborhoods. Guard dogs may get spiked collars so that they can ward off attacks on their charges.

Thing 2: whatever their bdsm origins might have been, spiked collars worn by people now seem to be primarily fashion statements, valued because they’re so noticeable. But, since they stand out, they also serve to call attention to the wearer’s collar, which is a sign of their bondage and/or submission; as a result, a spiked collar conveys not aggressiveness, but subservience.

Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

The bag of clownfish

December 15, 2022

(Warning: a partial draft of this essay was accidentally posted an hour and a half ago. I know from bitter experience that trying to delete a posted draft and replace it with the final product unfolds into disaster, so I’m just treating this as an update of that earlier posting. Please bear with me.)

In today’s (12/15) Rhymes With Orange cartoon, a delightful exercise in cartoon understanding: to appreciate the point of the joke (set in a pet store and focused on tropical fish), you need to know something quite specific about modern American popular culture, having to do with circus acts.


(#1) Two young women — perhaps, we speculate, a couple, though that seems not to be relevant to the joke — have bought some (tropical) fish, in water in plastic bags (two in one bag, one in the other); the pet store clerk is now handing them a bag of clownfish as well: a bag jam-packed to the brim with brightly colored tiny fish

Why is that funny?

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Understanding comics | 4 Comments »

Two Liz Climo cartoons

December 12, 2022

Very much a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, opening up a variety of themes, some of them deeply personal for me. But here I just present two delightful Liz Climo cartoons that moved me.

The first is recent, posted by Climo on Facebook on 11/29 and apparently at the moment available only on her FB page. The characters are Bunny and Bear, who have forged a mutually supportive friendship in part by surmounting the natural inclinations of bears to devour rabbits, and of rabbits to dig up the landscape for burrows (thus ruining the lawns that are Bear’s great pride).

The second is from a continuing series of cartoons involving the polar creatures Penguin and Polar Bear. The cartoons:


(#1) My title: One Trip — a delight for me, since my man Jacques was an extreme advocate of the One Trip, approaching Bear levels; as annoying as this was (I played the Bunny part in our One Trip drama), now that he’s been gone for 20 years, the cartoon slashed open a moment of real grief, in which his masculine pigheadedness now seems endearing


(#2) My title: Margarita Snowman — this one is to send to cartoonist Bob Eckstein, author of the marvelous The Illustrated History of the Snowman (2018); see the digression on the book in my 12/3 posting “In the mail: The sleep of reason produces snowmen”

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | 1 Comment »

The buildings are barking

December 2, 2022

In the 12/1 Zippy strip, a moment of somniloquy that would be an excellent donnée for a poem:


(#1) Another loving memorial by cartoonist Bill Griffith of his late wife, cartoonist Diane Noomin, adding to what he wrote in an 11/20 strip (reproduced in my 11/20 posting “A touching memorial”)

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

In the realm of the footstools

December 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 the rabbits of December take us to the hidden spot in the tropical jungle where ottomans rule among the palm trees, as depicted in this John McPherson Close to Home cartoon of 2/14/15:


(#1) A pun on Ottoman Empire, the Turkish realm, and ottoman, a kind of footstool

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Posted in Ambiguity, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The boy-girl thing

November 30, 2022

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for Ultimate November, which is also St. Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland (a day for unicorns, thistles, and heather; and haggis, shortbread, and whisky)

The One Big Happy strip from 10/7, another in a series on boys and masculinity:


James and Joe, playing with their cars — and contemplating how to negotiate the shift away from the significantly homosocial world of childhood to the more complex heterosocial worlds of adolescence

Note that Monica signals her openness to further exchange with Joe — and that she picks Joe rather than James; if you know the strip’s characters, you will see that she has chosen wisely.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | 1 Comment »

A monumental puzzle in cartoon understanding

November 26, 2022

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon — they’re a Bizarro specialty — that is incomprehensible if you don’t recognize the figure of the patient and know about this patient’s history with psychiatry (cardboard box??):


(#1) Incredibly, it’s also significant that this is today’s Bizarro, and that today is 11/26/22 (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

Significant, in that your appreciation of the joke will be heightened some if you understand that today is a notable anniversary associated with the figures in the cartoon.

And your appreciation might be heightened a bit more if you recognize who the therapist in the cartoon is (based on).

All of this is so in-jokey arcane that the actual cartoon distributed by Cartoon Kingdom includes a bottom line explaining the significance of the date, which is then a key to unraveling everything else. But the patient, you have to recognize the patient.

Who is not just a character in a cartoon (in this cartoon, the way the therapist is), but a character from a specific comic strip, drawn in the style of that strip, so that the patient looks “cartoony” in a way the therapist does not.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 6 Comments »

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