comix

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 17, 2012 is: comix • \KAH-miks\  • noun : comic books or comic strips Examples: Raw, founded by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly in 1980, was the leading avant-garde comix journal of its time. "[George Kuchar] became involved in comix through his neighbor in San Francisco in the 1980s, Art Spiegelman; he went on to do many comix storyboards as well as underground comix." -- From an article by Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee in The Brooklyn Rail, December, 2011 Did you know? Comix (which are typically understood as distinct from comics in that they intend a mature audience) got their start in the 1960s. Our earliest evidence of the word "comix" used as a generic term dates to 1969, but it had begun appearing in the titles of specific works a little earlier than that: one example is the title of R. Crumb's highly influential Zap Comix, first published in 1968. The kind of alteration that changed "comics" to "comix" isn't a 20th century phenomenon: the word "pox," as in "chicken pox," began as "pocks" but has been spelled with an "x" since around 1475. A similar kind of alteration, though in this case going from a simpler spelling to a less intuitive one, is the word "phat," which is most likely a variation of "fat." "Phat" dates to 1963. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.