Next week, Comic-Con returns to San Diego, where, back in August 1970, it
began life as the Golden State Comic Book Convention in the basement of the U.S. Grant
Hotel. That first event drew about a hundred attendees.
San Diego Comic-Con has become the largest gathering of comics and pop
culture enthusiasts in the world. Around 130,000 will flock to the fun as our city perks up
to the joys and color of comic book characters in our collective consciousness. These
creations are so woven into the warp and woof of our culture that some of them have
morphed into images and words in our everyday speech and writing.
Thomas Nast, perhaps the most famous political cartoonist in our history, was
responsible for the popularity of two party animals. During the election of 1828,
opponents of President Andrew Jackson labeled him a “jackass” for his populist beliefs.
Jackson was entertained by the notion and ended up using it to his advantage on his
campaign posters. Nast is credited with making Jackson’s donkey the symbol of the
Democratic Party through one of his cartoons that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1870.
Four years later, also in Harper’s Weekly, Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion’s
skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. One of those animals, the elephant, was
labeled “The Republican Vote.” That’s all it took for the elephant to become associated
with Republicans.
In 1928, Walt Disney gave the world a Mickey — an all-American mouse who
performed heroic deeds and squeaked his undying love for Minnie. Soon after World War II,
international markets were flooded with wristwatches bearing Mickey’s likeness. Because these
watches were generally cheap affairs subject to mechanical breakdowns, people started calling
anything shoddy or trivial “Mickey Mouse.”
For more than eight decades, Blondie’s husband has been slapping together culinary
masterpieces in his kitchen, yet he doesn’t appear to have gained an ounce (for which I envy
him). Dagwood carries on his arms and head a cornucopia of ingredients from the fridge to the
kitchen table. The massive repasts he concocts are now known as “Dagwood sandwiches.”
Some linguists trace the noun “wimp” and the adjective “wimpy” to Elzie Segar’s
cartoon strip “Thimble Theatre,” which, when animated became “Popeye.” Wimpy was a mild-
mannered, soft-spoken, lazy, parsimonious, and utterly gluttonous hamburger-wolfing straight
man to Popeye.
The opposite of a wimp is a Superman, the comic book creation of writer Jerry Siegel
and artist Joe Schuster. Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able
to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Superman has become a superman, a person who
exhibits extraordinary powers.
Siegel and Schuster purloined the name Superman from the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch, meaning ”overman,” in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and
George Bernard Shaw's translation of the term in his play “Man and Superman.”
“On the fritz,” meaning “not operating properly,” may have started with one of the
earliest comic strips, “The Katzenjammer Kids.” Typically, the two hyperactive German boys,
Hans and Fritz, caused all sorts of troubles for the Captain and other grownups in the story.
Two men of strikingly disparate height are dubbed Mutt and Jeff. The original
mustachioed twosome, one tall, one short, inhabited a comic strip, the third created in the
United States, by Bud Fisher.
The name of H. T. Webster’s comic-strip character, Caspar Milquetoast, has become a
synonym for a wimpy, unassertive man. In a similar vein, some scholars assert that the term
“sad sack” to designate a pathetically inept man, especially a soldier, owes its origin to the
cartoon army private created by George Baker in 1942.
“D’oh!,” enshrined in many dictionaries, is the best-known exclamation of frustration
hollered by Homer Simpson, in the animated sitcom “The Simpsons.” Homer typically yells,
“d’oh!” when he does something stupid.
The most famous and enduring of all quotations ever to emerge from a comic strip
is the pronouncement declaimed by Walt Kelly’s immortal possum, Pogo: “We have met
the enemy, and he is us!” Some grammar mavens would argue that the “us” in Pogo's
statement is cast in the wrong pronoun case. “We” is technically the correct pronoun form
for a predicate nominative, but it would be sacrificing poetry on the altar of grammatical
purism to recast the sentence as “We have met the enemy, and he is we!”