Mort Walker (1923-2018) was the creator of several iconic American comic strips, mostly famously Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, both of which are still in newspaper syndication today.

Chris Ware is the author of the Acme Novelty Library series and several highly regarded graphic novels, among them Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Rusty Brown.

Brian Walker is the son of Mort Walker and part of the creative team that now produces new strips of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois.

"The Lexicon of Comicana is a classic that belongs on every cartoonist's shelf!" --Raina Telgemeier

"Walker wrote this rather remarkable and remarkably unpretentious pretentious tome which served, however loosely, to begin to define comics as its own distinct mother tongue when few other cartoonists or even real people thought of it that way." --Chris Ware (from the foreword)

"With this groundbreaking book, Mort Walker provided a vocabulary to describe the essence of cartoon art that enabled readers to analyze the workings of his art form." --Lucy Shelton Caswell, founding curator, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Publisher: New York Review Comics

Pub date: 2025-09-30

Length: 128 pages