A Show of Hands

Not the hands of cartoonists, mind you, but the hands of cartoons -- the splayed fingers or twisted fists, rigid indexes, throbbing thumbs, pulsating pinkies... you get the drift. Sure, our hands are useful for all sorts of manual chores, but as emotive symbols, they're neglected, a pitiful third cousin to the palpitating face and pothering voice. The human hand -- that prince of appendages -- has 29 bones, 29 major joints, about 50 nerves and more than 120 ligaments. That's enough ganglia to mime an opera of emotions: a yammer of remorse, perhaps, or a blunt "sit on it."

Problem is, hands are hard to draw. They look different from every angle, each finger bending and foreshortening in its own way. Drawing them with their subtleties intact can be a bit like trying to name that mystery flavour in your masala dinner. Cartoonist Milton Caniff, whose 1940s serials Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon are landmark action-adventure comics, suffers a slight wrinkle in his legacy for the graceless mitts he sometimes forced upon his sleek heroes. Robert Crumb, a crack letterer and master of form and shadow, arms his zaftig fauns with gorilla paws, knackwurst fingers sweating in slabs of palm, which he bemoans as a chink in his draftsmanship.

Crumb, and many hand-delayed cartoonists like him, instead seek refuge in the blobby, four-fingered stylings of early American animation, like the characters that sprung from the fountain pens of Ub Iwerks and Max Fleischer in the 1920s. Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and a whole cast of simpering miscreants had three fingers and a thumb, not just for reductionist kicks but because drawing your bouncy runts with one less finger meant a quicker turnaround on the cartoon shorts that lit up the big screens in those roaring decades.

Comics have always shared conjugal quarters with animation. Our opposable thumbs may be credit at the food-chain supermarket, but in the cartoon wilderness Charlie Brown's hands can look like Snoopy's (three fingers or four, depending on the task), and neither is any less dexterous.

In the '90s, Bill Watterson milked this licence to a lather in Calvin & Hobbes. Though his lanky tiger and knee-high brat had only 16 fingers between them, their hands were marvels of expression. When Hobbes flipped his paw at one of Calvin's tirades, his pinky curled and palm sank in an unmistakable moue. When Calvin made a fist, his index jutted like a smothered erection inching to burst. The touches were slight, but enough to mimic a real hand's nuances. Watterson wrote sizzling dialogue, but it was his characters' supple hands -- cartoony but convincing -- that punctuated it.

The four-finger style is mainly an American convention. In Japan, missing fingers are seen as evidence of a menial job, so people are commonly drawn with the standard handful. Both guys and gals are often given slender, balletic hands that sit on the end of their wrists like shy flowers. You'll find the same affectation in Adrian Tomine's skeletal extremities, drawn with a frigid restraint that mirrors the urban malaise in his Optic Nerve stories. Maurice Vellekoop and Chester Brown often turn their fingers into tapered noodles that curl into vague fist shapes or sway wistfully, lending characters an unspoken vulnerability.

Capturing a mood or personality with something as unassuming as a hand takes serious chops, especially in comics' cramped confines, where the smallest flubbed angle or neglected detail can turn a delicate main into a mangled loaf. Of course, attention and skill give voice to every art form. It's just that, in comics, the hands have more to say.