Bridwell Kryptonese
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Kryptonese in the Silver & Bronze Age
1950s to 1985
This version of Kryptonian, referred to as Kryptonese by its creator, E. Nelson Bridwell, and his successor, Al Turniansky, appeared in the comics from the 1950s until the John Byrne’s reboot in 1986. No words or language was actually depicted in the comics, rather, the writers would make scribbles that looked like language, and later Bridwell tried to gather these into actual symbols.
As Turniansky eventually wrote regarding the symbols appearing in the comics, ”…I know that they’re arbitrary, because I tried transliterating some examples from the comics using his alphabet, and they’re completely unpronounceable.” Indeed, it is apparent that Bridwell was no linguist just from the “alphabet” he created — and I’m being generous calling it that.
Immediately on hearing that his writing system is 118 characters, a sane linguist would immediately assume it to be a syllabary or an abjad. Rather, it’s a collection of typical English phonemes overshadowed by a mass of impractical consonant clusters. This version of Kryptonese is a fascinating glimpse into a different time and a different way of thinking; Bridwell attempted to imagine the “fantastic other” without realizing how much of his own linguistic paradigms he was smuggling in.
Regarding any actual language tied to the Bridwell alphabet, unfortunately with Turniansky’s passing, any work toward that end has been lost save for the two word phrase he put at the top of his site (mirrored at the top of this page) which we can only assume means something like “Krypton’s Language”. Aside from those two words, all that remains is Bridwell’s quirky alphabet.
Despite the loss of any work Turniansky did on a language, we still owe a huge debt of gratitude to him for preserving Bridwell’s alphabet; were it not for him, this alphabet would likely have been lost forever.
At some point, I took it upon myself to take the single, low-res screen shot Turniansky provided of his bitmap Bridwell font and turn it into a modern, vector-based font. No small feat, to be sure.
Interestingly, DC Comics has recently adopted my Bridwell font in several comics to depict Kryptonian — using it just as a cipher/transliteration and (smartly) ignoring the overly-complicated extended set of characters. It seems that through a strange and circuitous path, the comics are now coming full circle back to Bridwell’s original script.