frontier cartoonology
Every now and then in cartoonamatizing you run across an undocumented frontier: an event in real life, or media life, that has not to your knowledge been depicted in cartoon form. Exciting! Puzzling. Sometimes, intractable. Consider this commonplace media cliche: the particular bellow of disgust that a frat boy, or more typically a group of frat boys, emits when encountering the idea of something that is not as sexually/gastronomically appealing as they perhaps feel entitled to bear in their presence. It is a very particular sound. Can’t imagine it? Well let me supply you a sample.
(I couldn’t quite pull it off with the full gusto you usually encounter it with, so I kind of went surfer dude with it. No that is not how my voice usually sounds in real life.)
The question: how do you transliterate this particular utterance?
“Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,” literally, using a hard “o” as in “box”, which is the sound. But as you can see, on the page, that doesn’t work. It needs to convey disgust. And, uh. Actually it looks, um, really positive.
“Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-hhh” is our next choice – but, while it doesn’t come off quite as enthusiastic as our first choice, sounds kinda like stepping in front of a fireplace after trudging through a blizzard, or some shit.
Umlauts, you say! And indeed, an umlaut is a wonderful thing, but in this case merely communicates Germanitude or the presence of high concentrations of The Metal. This will not, in this case, do.
Dipthong time! Bring in the dipthongs. Mind the carpet. “Awh-wh-wh-wh-wh”: looks like you’re greeting a kitten in Welsh. “Agh-gh-gh-gh-gh”: a fatal blow to the trachea. “Ogh-gh-gh-gh-gh”: motherfucker are you throat singing or something? “Owh-wh-wh-wh-wh”: minor burn, dancing around, looking for body of water. “Oah-ah-ah-ah-ah”: what is this, Stereotypical Tribal Chant Day? “Auh-uh-uh-uh-uh”? This is… intangibly wrong. It looks sort of like an opera singer with a bad case of the stutters.
Right. This is where I failed. It is possible that one of my readers knows how to transliterate this sound, or perhaps a cartoonist type passing by the site can share their thoughts on the subject. This, and all issues like it, are greatly important for expanding the frontiers of cartoonology. You could have the next Zot! or Bamf! on your hands. This is where it’s at, people.
In the cartoon in question, part 7 of 8 in the saga of The Chip Invasion, I went with the variation “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!”, which isn’t entirely satisfactory but basically gets the emotion across. There is another variant, “Ehh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh,” but as far as I am aware that version is confined to US secondary schools in the mid to late ‘80s. Hopefully the illustrations of an increasingly imperial Sara, an increasingly stupid Chip, and an increasingly healed Beans will in some way compensate for the sting of my frontier failure. Well, that, liquor, and fatmaking amounts of chocolate pudding. Next time, I’m bringing four ships and a parrot.
i've got a headache like a pillow the sleep of monsters brings forth reason