Often you have to cheat a little when you get to X. One very popular ABC in our house spells fox backwards to get its X animal. Dr. Seuss just lists a few words you can use x in. Another of our favorite abecedaries basically coins a word from the Greek. And quite a few just resort to words that start with an "x" sound, like "expotition."
My cheat this time is to turn to scientific binomial nomenclature, which is full of Hellenic formulations. There's a horrid species of flower bug, for example, named Xylocoris maculipennis; it's notorious for practicing not merely traumatic insemination but male-to-male traumatic insemination, in which the aggressor's sperm migrate to the testes of the victim. There's also the death-watch beetle, Xestobium rufovillosum, the common name of which refers to the ticking sound it makes by banging its head on old furniture and old timbers.
But if you're going to do up a bug, why not go right to the top of the ladder of nastiness?
It may not be the most lethal animal on earth any more, but this week X is for Xenopsylla cheopis, the oriental rat flea, a.k.a. the plague flea.
(Clicky, enlargey.)
John Donne had no way to know what terrors a flea could really be guilty of. This nasty little guy is a disease vector both for the bubonic plague and for a strain of typhus, and when it carried the Black Death through Europe nearly half of the population died in a four-year period.
I tweaked the anatomy a bit to get the cartoon going, since I didn't just want to reproduce the standard on-its-side-on-a-microscope-slide image that other people have done better than I can. Any overly picky entomologists can have a full refund.
This is hardly the first flea to appear on the Satisfactory Comics blog. We've been "asked," in the past, to draw manga fleas. And Satisfactory Comics #5, of course, featured as its main villain the world-dominator manqué The King of Fleas.
(Maybe one of these days I'll finally post the Kang of Fleas.)
Next week: you wouldn't think you could carry a pouch there...
Speaking as someone whose on-its-side flea didn't turn out as great as he wanted, you made the right decision.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, you know, fleas don't really have faces!
ReplyDelete(I wonder if that means vegetarians would eat them. Of course, it's not as if the vegetarians would have a choice; I'm sure they eat loads of mites and springtails and so forth by accident if not fleas... Where was I?)
... But if you're going to cartoon a flea "looking menacing" -- or having any expression at all -- you have to cheat.
My whole post this week is about reasons why you have to cheat. And the question of which animal is actually the most lethal.
Fleas certainly do pack a vicious punch for their size! Even the non-plague-carriers can feel like a plague when they reach critical mass in one's house. Another really creepy thing about them-- they go after sickly animals on purpose. We had a major infestation once when one of our cats was ill. So miserable for all concerned except the foul fleas!
ReplyDeleteOh, I almost forgot to comment on the cheating part. I do that all the time for various reasons... aesthetic, poetic, comedic, or purely self-indulgent. It does sometimes make me feel a little guilty, but hey, I'm not technically a scientific illustrator after all. (On the rare occasions when I have been, I stick strictly to reality.)
ReplyDeleteProbably there's no way to cartoon anything without a little bit of cheating — shifting proportions and so forth.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm sure I wouldn't feel guilty about putting eyeballs on the face of an anthropomorphic pencil, or whatever.
Would you feel guilty, Isaac, if you didn't put a pair of pants (or diapers) on that anthropomorphic pencil? "For decency"?*
ReplyDelete*See Elm City Jams #1, possibly still available from this website...
(Yes, "anthropomorphic pencil" was an Easter-egg for hardcore SatCom / ECJ fans. Maybe I should have said "bearded monocle-wearing guitar-playing cactus.")
ReplyDeleteBut Isaac, there was no "cheating" involved in Tom O'Donnell's rendition of ZZ Top Monocle Cactus: his drawing looked exactly like the genuine article. (Tom's just that good, is all!)
ReplyDeleteDang, you really outdid yourself on this one! Nice work!
ReplyDeletep.s. What do you teach? Literature?
ReplyDeleteLupi -- I do indeed teach literature; so does Mike, my erstwhile (and, I hope, future) collaborator.
ReplyDeleteThat's why the Donne poem was on the tip of my tongue while drawing this flea. (But that doesn't very well explain why Xylocoris maculipennis leapt to my mind...)
I'm glad you like the cartoon and/or the post! Only two letters left!