I have written about my love affair with newspaper comics before. From my childhood I have read the comics pages in the newspapers and continue to do so in my local newspaper the Plain Dealer. I used to read every single comic in it but after some time I stopped reading some of them because they were not simply not funny (Marmaduke for example) or because I was not interested in the dramatic ones that had long storylines like Spiderman or Judge Parker.
Falling into the latter category is Mary Worth, a soap-opera strip in which the story progresses so slowly that one could skip entire weeks and still not miss anything. But recently my attention was drawn again to it because they seem to have a new illustrator and the title character has changed her looks. She looks younger, has slimmed down, and is more glamorous and less matronly. But what struck me was that some of the words spoken by the characters are bolded for no apparent reason.
Intrigued, I have been following the strip recently trying to figure out why certain words are bolded and have failed miserably to detect any pattern. Usually words are bolded because the speaker is supposed to be emphasizing or even yelling them. But this strip provides no discernible rationale that I can see. Take this week’s strips, starting from Tuesday’s one that I have reproduced below.
If you try to speak the words and add emphasis on the bolded ones, it sounds ridiculous.
Weird.
I’m hardly an expert but I’ve read comics that do this before. None of them ever held my interest for too long but it made me wonder as well. The only thing I could come up with was these are key words that the author thinks will help you parse what’s going on if you skim and miss most of the rest. I think some of them are bolded just to keep you from skipping too much, like “towel folding” here.
I’m more used to this sort of thing in interactive programs where some cue like bolding, underlining or colorizing a word gives you the clue that you can interact with it. Mostly used for clues in a mystery story or objects that can pick up that will let you solve a puzzle later, etc.
What struck me early on about comics dialogue is how sentences very rarely end in periods! If it’s not a question, it will almost always end in an exclamation point! Once I started seeing it, I had a hard time ignoring it! It started to drive me nuts until I finally regained the ability to not see it!
I think it likely that the author is simply using bolding for too many purposes at once. It probably saves space over using things like quotations marks (for sarcasm and the like), it can represent vocal emphasis or inflection, it can even server as the author’s emphasis to draw attention to important words like names (at least that’s the only reason I can fathom for bolding the names). But by using them excessively and inconsistently, the author has created a visual mess with the text.
Mano, please tell me you’re familiar with the Comics Curmudgeon -- Josh Fruhlinger, and his extensive coverage of Aldomania back in ’06. That biz was the best.
Chiroptera @#2,
Those exclamations points used to bug me too! I notice that some comic strips have stopped doing that though Mary Worth still remains committed to using them forever.
I wonder if it was because the cartoonists felt that the periods may not show up as clearly when the comic was printed.
Great American Satan,
No, I was not aware of this. Thanks for introducing me!
Regarding excessive exclamation points in dialogue: It was a proofreading thing. Back in the day, it was a rare printing plate that didn’t have some unwanted specks on it… and if a black speck happened to appear, just by chance, in a location where it might be sensible to read it as a period rather than a speck, the dialogue could be distorted. The period being the smallest punctuation mark, and most prone to that sort of ‘mistaken identity’ deal, publishers decided they just wouldn’t use periods in dialogue. Of the remaining punctuation marks, the exclamation point was pressed into service as the standard end-of-sentence indicator.
Current printing tech is good enough that there is no longer any practical reason for excessive use of exclamation points. To the extent that it happens anyway, it’s mostly because it’s become customary/traditional.
@ Chiroptera No. 2
A writer, it may have been Elmore Leonard, once remarked that a novelist should only be allowed three exclamation points in one book. I’ve always thought that a sensible rule.
Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write
I remember that random bolding from reading various superhero comics as a kid. I also vainly tried to find a pattern in the bolded words. So, not unique to [i]Mary Worth[/i].
themadtapper,
Maybe, but for me at least, it works fine if I imagine it purely as vocal emphasis.
(The conceit is those emphases are from the character, not from the author)