He had his first comic gag published at the age of 11. To this day, it’s studied in art schools around the world, not just as a textbook but as a treatise explaining why the funnies matter.īorn in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri, Mort Walker has been an insanely prolific cartoonist for almost 75 years. But the book ended up doing far more than that. Barely 96 pages, mostly cartoons and white space, The Lexicon was Walker’s own silly attempt to classify the symbols used in comic strips around the world. In 1980, Mort Walker–the creator of comic strips like Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois–published a charming book titled The Lexicon of Comicana. In both importance and scope, there’s a lot more to the design of the comics section than you might realize. But if you look beyond the simple linework and frozen-in-time gags, the comics section is really the part of every newspaper that is dedicated to the language of cartoon symbology. That’s not what happens in real life, obviously. And every time you said anything, it would result in words actually burbling up to hang in a cloud above you.

If you didn’t bathe, visible smell waves would waft off of you. When you swore, your curse words would censor themselves as a long, seemingly random series of nonverbal iconography. If you were a cartoon character, canaries would erupt from your cracked skull and fly around in circles every time you hit your head.

Comic life 3 cartoonify