Polite Dissent

One of my favorite comic books when I was growing up was The Micronauts – they were some of my favorite toys too, so it made sense that I’d read the comic (but boy was I upset when I realized that they had made Acroyear a good guy. Everyone knows that he’s a bad guy! One of the most exciting things about the comic were the hidden messages. The denizens of the Microverse used an alphabet that looked a great deal like Sanskrit, but managed to translate perfectly into English. Using this alphabet, the comic creators could write secret messages and insert them directly into the panel where only a few loyal (and/or obsessive) fans would be able to read them. As a kid, that struck me as cool (actually, it still does today).

Micronauts wasn’t the only book with it’s own alphabet. Interlac showed up frequently in the Legion of Super-Heroes and Kryptonian showed up in the various Superman titles.

Sadly, this practice seems to have diminished over the years, though I have every hope that Waid and Kitson will bring it back in the new Legion (though I do appreciate the “secret codes” in the back of Girl Genius – another flash of Silver Age fun).

• The Homeworld Alphabet (from Micronauts).
• The Interlac alphabet.
• Kryptonian.