or by it’s full title “The Lexicon of Comicana” is one of those books which keeps surprising and amusing you, just by looking randomly in it. The official description goes like this: “Written as a satire on the comic devices cartoonists use, the book quickly became a textbook for art students. Walker researched cartoons around the world to collect this international set of cartoon symbols. The names he invented for them now appear in dictionaries.”
The subject matter of this book are all those small drawings that comic book artists use to describe the state of mind of their characters or for setting the mood of the story…. whether the basic idea was satire or not, Mort Walker, added something rare to comic books back in 1980 when Comicana first came out: self-analysis and introspective reflexions. The comments, definitions and thoughts that he shared back then are still very up to date and largely adopted by people wanting to add a perspective to comic book history and the history of comic books.
