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No. 119: Boatman Bateman

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Boatman Bateman

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=119

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{A boat, whose passengers are the souls of the dead, is crossing the gloomy, misty river Styx. Standing at the prow is a robed, hooded figure. Beneath the robes is Patrick Bateman, with his face spattered in blood, mouth wide and eyes staring, similar to the American Psycho movie poster.}

caption: American Psychopomp

The author writes:

While researching this strip, I found that the pronunciation of Charon (the Greek ferryman of the dead and also the moon of Pluto) is fraught with confusion. I believe that the ancient Greek pronunciation (OK, there could have been more than one) would have had an "ah" vowel, but Wikipedia and several other online sources, including dictionaries, are wildly inconsistent regarding the English pronunciation, covering territory like "keh", "kay" and "care", and give the second syllable as "uhn", "on" and "un". Of course, without using IPA notation, these renderings probably mean a range of different sounds to different readers, but you get the idea about how varied it is, anyway. I suspect there would be font rendering issues if I tried to include IPA here. My pronunciation of "car-on" was not among them. The Greeks would have been clearing their throats with the initial consonant, but at least that generally becomes "k" in English.

Except in the case of the name of Pluto's moon, which starts with "sh" because some astronomer promised his wife he'd name it after her. Even the details of that story seem to vary from telling to telling as well. The Wikipedia page on Charon suggests that that pronunciation is not official, however.

Drawn in Krita and Inkscape.