One of the most charming and quirky documents covering comics language is Mort Walker’s The Lexicon of Comicana. The creator of Beetle Bailey put together a thorough study of what he called “teteology” – the study of how cartoon facial expressions express emotion – and other comics language. It’s mostly stuff we have absorbed almost subconsciously:

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“Teteology” is just one of a vast lexicon of terms that Walker created to catalog the effects of cartooning in the book, which was originally published in 1980 as a sort of humorous takeoff on guide books. And new a new editions is on its way from NY Review Books:

For Mort Walker, creator of the iconic Beetle Bailey, the language of comics is universal. It’s in our road signs and user’s manuals; it’s hidden behind our mischievous expressions, our japes and gripes, our puns and jokes. The Lexicon of Comicana is his madcap attempt to catalog the colorful, motley system of comics, from the types of speech bubbles (“fumetti”) to the shapes of bodies (“morfs”) to the pell-mell lines surrounding a fierce scuffle or trailing behind a sprinter (“blurgits”). There is a guide to identifying comic stereotypes (the tramp by his bindle, the rich man by his top hat and cane), a catalog of “trite and trite again” overdone situations (the desert island, the bed of nails, the psychiatrist and his couch), and a guide to “maladicta,” the sly ways of concealing naughty words in newsprint, called “jarns,” “quimps,” “nittles,” and “grawlixes.”

 
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The new edition is coming out on September 30th with a foreword by Chris Ware and edited by Brian Walker, son of Mort.
 
While Walker’s listing of tropes and visual shorthand might not be entirely compatible with contemporary standards – some of these stereotypes are very outdated, and others speak to a mid-century mundanity that we’re far removed from – this is still a book stuffed with ideas that cartoonists can learn from, as the blurbs make clear:
 
 “The Lexicon of Comicana is a classic that belongs on every cartoonist’s shelf!” —Raina Telgemeier
 
“Walker wrote this rather remarkable and remarkably unpretentious pretentious tome which served, however loosely, to begin to define comics as its own distinct mother tongue when few other cartoonists or even real people thought of it that way.” —Chris Ware (from the foreword)
 
“With this groundbreaking book, Mort Walker provided a vocabulary to describe the essence of cartoon art that enabled readers to analyze the workings of his art form.” —Lucy Shelton Caswell, founding curator, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
 
Scrolling through a review copy, I was struck by how many of these examples of classic comics shorthand are still used by young cartoonists. You can find them on webtoons, in kids comics, and even in manga in one form or another. Truly, these are some of the building blocks of our shared understanding of pictures as storytelling for human emotions. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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