science

The Lexicon of Comicana

The Lexicon of Comicana is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Lexicon of Comicana rather than just read about it. In short: The Lexicon of Comicana is a 1980 book by the American cartoonist Mort Walker. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the devices used by comics cartoonists.

Key takeaways

The Lexicon of Comicana belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Lexicon of Comicana to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Lexicon of Comicana from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Lexicon of Comicana is a 1980 book by the American cartoonist Mort Walker. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the devices used by comics cartoonists. In it, Walker extends Charles D. Rice's earlier work on comic symbol names and comes up with an international set of symbols called symbolia after researching cartoons around the world (described by the term comicana). In 1964, Walker had written an article called "Let's Get Down to Grawlixes", a satirical piece for the National Cartoonists Society. He used terms such as grawlixes for his own amusement, but they soon began to catch on and acquired an unexpected validity. The Lexicon was written in response to this. The names invented for these symbols sometimes appear in dictionaries, and serve as convenient terminology occasionally used by cartoonists and critics. A 2001 gallery showing of comic- and street-influenced art in San Francisco, for example, was called "Plewds! Squeans! and Spurls!" A new edition was published in 2025.

Examples Agitrons: wiggly lines around a shaking object or character. Blurgits: a kind of stroboscopic technique to show movement within a single panel. Swalloops: curved lines preceding or trailing after a character's moving limbs. Briffits (💨): clouds of dust that hang in the wake of a swiftly departing character or object. Crottles: Crosses in place of someone's eyes indicating that they are passed out or dead. Dites, hites and vites: straight lines drawn across flat, clear and reflective surfaces, such as windows and mirrors. The first letter indicates direction: diagonal, horizontal and vertical respectively. Hites may also be used trailing after something moving with great speed. Emanata: lines drawn around the head to indicate shock or surprise Grawlixes (#, $, *, @): typographical symbols standing in for profanities, appearing in dialogue balloons in place of actual dialogue. Indotherm (♨): wavy, rising lines used to represent steam or heat. Lucaflect: a shiny spot on a surface of something, depicted as a four-paned window shape. Plewds (💦): flying sweat droplets that appear around a character's head when working hard, stressed, etc. Quimps (🪐): A special example of the grawlix, a symbol resembling the planet Saturn. Solrads: radiating lines drawn from something luminous like a lightbulb or the sun. Squeans (💫): little starbursts or circles that signify intoxication, dizziness, or sickness. Additional symbolia terms include whiteope, sphericasia, that-a-tron, spurls, oculama, maledicta balloons, farkles, doozex, staggeratron, boozex, digitrons, nittles, waftaroms, and jarns.

History of terminology A number of these symbol names, including squean, spurl, crottle, plewd, briffit, and femblor, were originally invented and described by Charles D. Rice starting in the 1940s. Comics scholar Maggie Thompson noted that these names were further published by Rice in What's Funny About That (1954), and also observed that, although Walker did cite his sources ("Charlie Rice of This Week magazine") in his 1975 book Backstage at the Strips, "many [including Thompson herself] (...) assumed [that this] was [Walker's] joke about an imaginary scholarly attribution."

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Lexicon of Comicana

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Lexicon of Comicana claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Lexicon of Comicana before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Lexicon of Comicana ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Lexicon of Comicana

In research: The Lexicon of Comicana appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Lexicon of Comicana in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Lexicon of Comicana is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1980 books, Books about comics, Cartooning, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Lexicon of Comicana outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Lexicon of Comicana in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Lexicon of Comicana means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Lexicon of Comicana out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Lexicon of Comicana in simple terms?

The Lexicon of Comicana is a 1980 book by the American cartoonist Mort Walker. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the devices used by comics cartoonists.

Why does The Lexicon of Comicana matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Lexicon of Comicana?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Lexicon of Comicana.