If you’re looking for something to get me for Christmas, this book would be perfect.
It’s The Lexicon of Comicana, by Mort Walker, the writer of Beetle Bailey. Here’s the cover:
Amazon’s blurb can’t be beat, so I’ll just quote it:
Written as a satire on the comic devices cartoonists use, the book quickly became a textbook for art students. Walker researched cartoons around the world to collect this international set of cartoon symbols. The names he invented for them now appear in dictionaries.