Originally published at: There's an official $#@&ing terminology for censoring swears like $#@&: Grawlix | Boing Boing
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That origin for the term is awesome. It’s like if someone misread Jack Handey and he suddenly became a revered philosopher.
Also, I had a Katzenjammer kids book when I was a kid. It made no sense since every cultural reference came from 80 years before I was born. The parish priest was going through some of his childhood comic strip collections and passed them out to the kids in the catechism class. I was jealous of the guy that got Popeye.
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I don’t really think the artist’s justification for grawlix use is terribly thoughtful or truthful. An expletive is only distracting if a.) the writing is bad and makes the curse glaring or b.) the reader is a particularly sheltered person. The use of grawlix a.) is always glaring in an otherwise serious text and b.) establishes the kind of “comics-are-for-kids” norm that makes expletives seem glaring to (particularly sheltered) comics readers, and perpetuates the problem, rather than solving it.
If an otherwise adult and unexpurgated film bleeped out its naughty words, and didn’t have a thoughtful metatextual reason for doing something so glaring and weird, it would be both distracting and unnecessary. Likewise, unless a comic is couching its language for kids, or indulging in some kind of pastiche of kids’ comics like Walker’s, grawlix use is a truly bizarre choice that is hard to justify. And attempts to do so, like this artist’s, fall as flat as your prudish granny sniffing that “It’s actually sexier the less you see” or whatever when confronted with nudity in media.
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From a previous BoingBoing post, Grawlix font:
And some copy-pastable grawlix:
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I always use the “International Phonetic Alphabet” for that one.
“Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot, Over.” (In my emotionally neutral air traffic controller voice.)
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This is kind of why I spell that dbag’s name *ucker Carlson.
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What I like about grawlixes is that it actually can be used when explicit language is allowed, because to me they represent emotion more than actual words. I always read them as being suppressed by the speaker, gritted teeth. It’s a sort of self-censoring that says, “here, dear reader, you get to decide just what was uttered.”
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I think it’s a good idea, myself. Overuse of strong words lessens their power.
Think about it - a comic uses these throughout until at the climax you see a character’s speech bubble that actually says “FUCK!!!”
OMG, shit just got real
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As these are goths, a helpful translation into the more familiar gaullish is provided.
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In my lifetime I’ve seen ‘fuck’ go from top 3 of the strongest swears you can use to something so common you might as well be saying consarnit (in the exclamative sense) or ‘take off hoser’ (in the direct insult sense).
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[Insert Perl joke here]
Anyway, there seem to be two schools of grawlix: one that uses more or less standard characters and one that uses little drawings of things like bombs, skulls and lightning bolts. Is there a pattern to which titles use which?
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Sad, innit?
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I’ve actually got Walker’s Lexicon somewhere in storage. It is pretty humorous – in Mort Walker’s broad style of comedy. But it is also useful as a teaching tool. There are so much in the graphic shorthand of Western comics, and it’s useful, I think, to see what those elements are and to think about what they mean. He also makes a point, at some point in the book, that the comics shorthand signals we’re familiar with in the West definitely don’t translate to other cultures, which is its own important lesson…
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Sometimes, well-chosen cuss words are the only way to get the point across.
Sometimes, though, a picture is worth a thousand words…
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The only real rule is which ones were available. If you are on a keyboard, then you tended to those which you could type. If you are hand lettering, then the letterer can let their imagination fly. The Asterix examples are good because Goscinny and Uderzo even used them as visual gags.
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Walker’s book - “The Lexicon of Comicana” - is really wonderful. Both funny and instructive. How could Mort not have realized that there was an actual use for “Grawlixes,” “Plewds,” and “Squeans”?
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