We’re all familiar with the idea that art imitates life—thank you, Aristotle. But life imitating art is more intriguing. College kids play Quidditch (from Harry Potter), and there are devotees who speak one of the Elvish languages (from The Lord of the Rings). Ordinary people take inspiration from The Scream and American Gothic when they pose for pictures. The entire world these days seems to be a version of 1984 and Wag the Dog.
The cartoonist Mort Walker’s The Lexicon of Comicana—which began as an exhibition half a century ago at the Museum of Cartoon Art—offers a textbook case of life imitating art. Walker conceived his lexicon as a lovingly ironic send-up of comic-strip conventions. He invented names for time-honored graphic elements—for instance, hites and briffits, the straight lines ending in little clouds that convey the idea of speed—and gave new life to terms invented by others that had been circulating for a while (such as plewds, the small drops of flying sweat that indicate exercise or embarrassment).
In 1980, he turned the exhibition into a book, which enjoyed an immediate vogue among the cartoonist set. I still have my tattered copy. But the book also fell into the hands of professors and began to be taken seriously. Before long, the invented lexicon was accepted as real, and all that terminology entered the language as actual words. You can look it up.
Walker, who died in 2018, was a longtime family friend and a central figure in the hundred-strong Connecticut cartoonist community that flourished in the postwar decades, and in which I grew up. In his work, and in person, he embodied an unusual mix of highbrow and lowbrow. He was steeped in the history of comic strips and founded a museum devoted to them; at the same time, his philosophical stance was to see all of human experience as potential material for a joke.
His most well-known strip, Beetle Bailey, made ample use of sight gags and pratfalls, and was at times just plain silly. But the characters also had an interior life. The strip kept a sharp eye on society, and could be sly and subversive.
I have a pencil sketch Mort gave me—an idea for a Beetle Bailey panel, though I don’t know if it was ever used—featuring the characters Plato (the bespectacled bookworm) and Zero (the bucktoothed numbskull). Zero is looking with wonder at Plato’s shelves of weighty volumes. “What’s in them?” he asks. Plato replies, “All the knowledge of the past on which we can base our actions in the future.” Zero has another question: “What if a couple of pages get stuck together?”
Hijacking the Hijackers
The silly, the sly, the subversive—they all came together in The Lexicon of Comicana, which appeared at a perfect moment. As the cartoonist and graphic novelist Chris Ware notes in his introduction, in the 1960s and early 1970s, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were busily hijacking comic art for their own ends. Universities had started to give pop culture serious, often tiresome, scrutiny. Walker set out to hijack the hijackers with a sort of mockumentary in comic-strip form.
The heart of the book is the lexicon itself. The tricks of artifice that cartoonists use to suggest meaning, with the briefest flick, have been second nature to readers for more than a century. We know when a character is meant to be shaking his head (lines like parentheses on either side), when a pie is hot (undulating lines flowing horizontally from the crust), and when a diamond ring or a car is brand-new (a corona of straight lines spiking around it).
These things all have names—well, made-up names. In this case: agitrons, waftaroms, and neoflects, all of them a subset of the larger category of emanata. The little hieroglyphs that connote strenuous cursing are nittles and jarns. The semicircular lines that follow an arm throwing a punch are known as swaloops.
Walker’s lexicon is both textual and visual—a compendium of comic-strip cues. “A bucket of paint,” Walker explains, “must always have heavy drippings around the rim. A highlight, whether on a dog’s nose or on a shoe, must always reflect a window. A pillow must always show a little ticking. A bump on the head results in a large lump, with emanata lines.”
We know when a cartoon character has been drinking—the bulbous nose has horizontal lines through it. Stretched eyeballs connote ogling. Diagonal lines—dites—turn a plain rectangle into a mirror or window. Rugs on the floor always have a wrinkle. An executive’s office always has a chart on the wall. Dialogue balloons—fumetti—can be cloud-like (indicating thought) or dotted (a whisper) or hung with icicles (a haughty snub). Passages in the lexicon are devoted to oculama and oralology—the various kinds of eyes and mouths.
The Lexicon of Comicana is one-half of a double-barreled Walker celebration. This year also marks the 75th anniversary of Beetle Bailey. It was the last strip to be personally approved by William Randolph Hearst before his death, and the story of Mort and Beetle Bailey has been captured in a lavish retrospective, Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey: 75 Years of Smiles, also published this month (by Fantagraphics).
Mort’s son, Brian, who carries on the Walker strip Hi and Lois, edited both books, as he has scores of others about comic strips. Somehow he also finds time to mount museum exhibitions around the country and the world. “Brian’s the real historian,” Mort told me once at a gathering of cartoonists, late in his life. Brian had seen us chatting and came over later. “Was he giving you the ‘real historian’ talk?” he asked.
But Mort was right. For a particular, maybe peculiar, slice of 20th-century culture, Brian’s work will be consulted for years to come. Unless a couple of pages get stuck together.
Cullen Murphy is an editor at large at The Atlantic and a former editor at large at Vanity Fair. For 25 years, he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant. His books include Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe
