Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, set at a rock concert and turning on a straightforward pun heavy metals on the model heavy metal (band):
(#1) Cu on drums, Co on (electric) guitar, Ni on vocals, Zn on acoustic guitar. But then there are all the devilish details, in the text and the images (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
The details are devilish because there are so many of them, involving choices made by Wayno in putting the cartoon together: the name of the concert venue; the size of the band; the name of the band; the physical appearance of the band members, their clothing, and their instruments; and their stances and gestures in the performance depicted here. Some of these choices were conscious choices by Wayno, but most just flowed from his pen, as it were, governed (if governed at all) by unconscious crafting of the material.
My task here is to catalog what I think are some of the most notable of the choices Wayno made. Unfortunately, the more I look at the cartoon, the more I see; there seems to be no end of details to note. So I’ll start by listing some things that came to me just moments ago, in the writing up of this posting, then go on to a more systematic discussion.
Shadows and colors. Wayno set out to draw a cartoon of a rock group in performance. It’s a cartoon, not a portrait, so the figures in it will be simplified. But there’s a huge range of available artistic styles, ranging from minimalist sketches to realistic, though simplified, drawings. Wayno’s inclinations put him very much on the realistic end of this scale.
Consider the lighting of the scene. Many cartoons live in a uniformly lit world, though in the real world there are sources of light, and so there are shadows. Wayno’s cartoon world has sources of light, with shadows carefully inked in. #1 depicts a rock concert, so there’s stage lighting — in fact, lighting by footlights (stage lighting is wonderfully complex; there are lots of possibilities), in front of the performers on the stage, so that they throw shadows behind them (conventionally represented, by lines on the stage, for all four performers in #1).
Then there’s color. A fair number of cartoons are b&w — and some cartoons, including Bizarro, are distributed in b&w as well as color versions. Wayno’s color drawings again lean to realism.
Even to small details: Cu’s skin is remarkably pale; Co and Ni have pinkish “white” skin; and Zn has brownish skin (which could make him a Mediterranean “white” guy or a Latino or a light-skinned “black” guy). (I tend to focus on Zn, because he’s a Z-person, like me. But for Wayno, he’s just one of the four.)
As for their clothes, Wayno has given all four of them black upperwear (t-shirt, tank top, or jacket), which just goes along with with their being a heavy metal band. And then introduced a blue and green color scheme into the scene: Cu’s drums are blue, and the other three players have colored trousers / jeans: blue for Co, green for Ni, and blue again for Zn. All three blues are the same shade. I have no idea whether any of this use of color means anything (though cobalt blue might have played a role); Wayno is depicting a word of objects with color, so everything in the cartoon has to be some color, and maybe he just went with hues that please him, or the ones that were closest to hand.
Quick, before I notice something else, on to the pun that’s the point of the cartoon; and some possibly significant choices Wayno made in drawing the cartoon.
The pun (and a naming surprise).To recap: the straightforward pun heavy metals on the model heavy metal (band). In a nutshell, from NOAD:
(adj. + noun) nominal heavy metal: 1 a type of highly amplified harsh-sounding rock music with a strong beat, characteristically using violent or fantastic imagery. 2 a metal of relatively high density, or of high relative atomic weight.
Now in more detail:
— on heavy metal music, from Wikipedia:
Heavy metal (or simply metal) is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the United Kingdom and United States. With roots in blues rock, psychedelic rock and acid rock, heavy metal bands developed a thick, monumental sound characterized by distorted guitars, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats and loudness.
In 1968, three of the genre’s most famous pioneers – British bands Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple – were founded.
Black Sabbath will come up again, so some basic facts about the band, from Wikipedia:
Black Sabbath were an English rock band formed in Birmingham in 1968 by guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward, bassist Geezer Butler and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne. They are often cited as pioneers of heavy metal music. The band helped define the genre with their first three albums Black Sabbath, Paranoid (both 1970) and Master of Reality (1971). Following Osbourne’s departure in 1979, the band underwent multiple line-up changes, with Iommi being the only constant member throughout their history.
— on heavy metals, from Wikipedia:
Heavy metals are metallic elements with relatively high densities, atomic weights, or atomic numbers. The criteria used, and whether metalloids are included, vary depending on the author and context.
Out of a very large collection of chemical elements that satisfy some of the heavy-metal criteria, to name his cartoon metal band, Wayno has chosen four that are contiguous in the periodic table of the elements:
27 Co (cobalt), 28 Ni (nickel), 29 Cu (copper), 30 Zn (zinc)
Remarkably — I doubt you were expecting this — these four elements were chosen not because of their place in the periodic table (this was probably a fortunate accident), but because of the prosodic properties of their English names: three trochees (strong syllable + weak syllable: SW) plus a monosyllable, to give a line of trochaic tetrameter (with reversed final foot), trochaic tetrameter being the poetic line that is the standard for folk music, popular music, and rock music in English. The fact is,
Cobalt, nickel, copper, and zinc
would be a fine line in a rock song (which could then be jokingly seen as a heavy metal song), and, yes,
Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, and Zinc
would be a fine jokey name for a heavy metal band.
This is not quite the name Wayno chose for his band in #1. He moved Cu into first position, possibly because it’s a yellowish metal and so could correspond to the very blond Cu member in the band (the only blond member), the drummer, who’s first in Wayno’s display of the four members.
Two things. One, I have no idea how many of these design choices were conscious on Wayno’s part, and he probably doesn’t, either. Two, we have only just scratched the surface of the choices that were made. (I’ll press on, but I can’t promise anything like complete coverage,)
The name of the venue. Centerville, the name of a generic small American town. Conceivably an allusion to a specific Centerville — for example, Centerville OH.
The size of the band. Four, the modal number for a rock band. From Wikipedia on rock music:
[A rock band] typically consists of between three (the power trio) and five members. Classically, a rock band takes the form of a quartet whose members cover one or more roles, including vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass guitarist, drummer, and often keyboard player or other instrumentalist.
The name of the band. We’ve already made an initial foray into the thicket of naming a heavy-metal band after heavy metals. Even if we’re just shooting for a 4-foot name with the prosodic pattern:
SW SW SW and S (three poundings and a slam)
Seven heavy metals have trochaic (SW) names: the four in #1, plus iron Fe, silver Au, and bismuth Bi.
Four heavy metals have monosyllabic (S) names: zinc Zn in #1, plus lead Pb, tin Sn, and gold Au.
This is a small universe if you’re aiming for a line of trochaic tetrameter; and most of the possibilities might be too elegant for heavy metal music (silver, gold), too weak (tin), too inert (lead), or too obscure (bismuth). That brings us down to the trochees in #1 plus iron; and, for the monosyllable, zinc. That is, the name in #1 looks (except for the ordering of the trochees) pretty much predetermined. (Of course you could aim for a different prosodic pattern.)
I note that the names of most heavy metals are dactylic (SWW) — platinum Pt, cadmium Cd, chromium Cr, thallium (Tl), etc. — but this pattern tends to be felt as rockingly pleasant or tongue-trippingly amusing, so not in heavy-metal music territory at all.
The band members. More generally, the specific characters depicted in Wayno’s cartoons. Where do these guys come from? The answer in the general case for Wayno is that they’re sometimes modeled on real people (a cartoon psychotherapist modeled on Freud, say), sometimes on Wayno’s friends and cartooning colleagues, sometimes they’re inventions of a typical whatever-it-is (though occasionally these turn out to resemble real people uncannily). Wayno could have picked some specific heavy metal band and caricatured them for this cartoon, but he hasn’t done that here, at least not in any straightforward way: Zn is depicted as a heavy-metal acoustic guitarist who’s bald, darkish-skinned, wears dark sunglasses, and has a droopy gray mustache, and I’m pretty sure there is no such guy in real life.
Now, my visual (as opposed to auditory) experience of heavy metal bands is quite limited, but the internet allows me to do a lot of browsing of possible candidates, and I don’t find anything like this band of four. Still, three of the four (excluding the drummer Cu) are complexly realized characters, excellent examples of the cartoonist’s art, but I can’t speculate on where they came from (though Co looks really familiar).
Stances and gestures. Finally, the guys aren’t just standing there playing their instruments or singing into a microphone; Wayno has caught them in the midst of performing with their whole bodies. Ni is doing a raised fist of exultation, and Zn is doing the sign of the horns, which (thanks to heavy metal music) has become a generalized sign of rock music (apparently, even Britney Spears does it).
In any case, from Wikipedia:
(#2) Ronnie James Dio of Black Sabbath deploying the sign of the horns in concertThe sign of the horns is a hand gesture with a variety of meanings and uses in various cultures. It is formed by extending the index and little fingers while holding the middle and ring fingers down with the thumb.
… Ronnie James Dio was known for popularizing the sign of the horns in heavy metal. He claimed his Italian grandmother used it to ward off the evil eye (which is known in Italy as malocchio). Dio began using the sign soon after joining the metal band Black Sabbath in 1979.
And then it spread in heavy metal, and diffused further into rock music in general, where it conveys something like “Rock on!”, which is how I read Zn’s use of it in #1.