Phlegmings

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Oral hygiene is for wimps!

In comic books and animated works, one way to demonstrate that a character is a no-nonsense Badass or creepy is to show them with strands of saliva, phlegm, drool, or some other mucus dangling between their teeth. Popularized by the various Rob Liefeld clones during the Dark Age of comics, but examples predate that period.

This occurs because drooling and oral messiness tends to invoke a Squick response in many people, making phlegmings a convenient visual shortcut for invoking Primal Fear. For instance, it may show anticipation of a good meal (e.g., the heroes/villains) in predator characters. Or it may be a sign of disease, like rabies (where one of the telltale symptoms of the disease are dense, foamy Phlegmings - if you see these in Real Life, run.)

In comic book images like the one shown, a saliva trail between upper and lower jaws works as a visual shorthand, indicating that the mouth has just now been opened (since such trails would be expected to disappear after a moment). Thus their use helps create a feeling of immediacy, that what you're seeing is a "snapshot" rather than a posed image.

A common trope for characters with More Teeth Than the Osmond Family. Contrast with Gonk, the blatant uglification of a character.

Cookie for you if you thought this was a trope about snot-based videogame enemies; it is also not likely that a Phlegming is the 'phlegmatic' member of a Four-Temperament Ensemble.

Trope originally identified by the HeroMachine blog.

Not to be confused with the author of the original James Bond books.

Examples of Phlegmings include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • The trope illustration is from the cover of The Pitt #2.
  • Spider-Man's collection of symbiote villains (Venom, Carnage, et al.) have this in spades.
  • Modern artists draw The Incredible Hulk with this.
  • When Wolverine goes into a berserker rage, he often has either this or flying spittle.
  • The horror hosts of EC Comics were big on this.
    • EC artist Graham "Ghastly" Ingels was particularly fond of them, as is his Spiritual Successor Berni Wrightson.
  • The brilliant but obscure graphic novel Age of Reptiles has every character displaying this trope all the time. Partially justified in that the characters are dinosaurs.
  • The Brood from the X-Men comics. Not surprising, since they were expys for the Alien xenomorphs.
  • Quite common with the Sith in Star Wars Legacy. Protagonist Cade will get this too at the times he's leaning more towards the dark.

Film

  • The title monsters in the Alien series often had mucus dripping from their teeth/mouths.
    • As well as a serious drool problem, makes you wonder what would happen if they were hatched from Labradors.
  • Every monster in From Beyond, but particularly the bat creature at the end.
  • Brundlefly excretes a sticky white liquid constantly, which he uses to dissolve and digest his food.
  • The Penguin from the Darker and Edgier Tim Burton sequel to Batman, Batman Returns, has a perpetual trickle of an oil-like bile running down his chin.
    • Actually, Danny DeVito was just so bombastic in his performance that he was constantly spitting-it's his makeup running, which actually works insofar as it illustrates that whatever illusions of apparent class he presents he's still kind of a psycho.
  • The creators of Tremors initially avoided this trope, in order to set their movie apart from the dark, dripping world of Alien, but realised upon watching the rushes that the Graboids didn't look real enough without it.
  • In the first Shrek movie, the title character lets out a blood-curdling roar that shows off just how good the computers were at rendering flying spittle. Several members of the angry mob have slimy faces in the next shot.
  • Stanley Kubrick loved this trope.
  • The Kraken from the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie takes this to an (intentionally) absurd level.
  • The killer in The Funhouse is constantly drooling due to his deformed features.
  • Featured in In the Mouth of Madness.
  • In Return of the Living Dead, when Freddy finally succumbs to the zombie hunger he starts foaming at the mouth like he's chewing on Alka-Seltzer.
  • Jay from Home Sweet Home.
  • Victor Crowley in Hatchet.
  • The sea monsters in Deep Rising.

Live-Action TV

Music

Video Games

Web Comics

  • R. L. from Kevin and Kell. His drooling jaws are almost all we ever see of him.

Web Original

  • The Heromachine blog had a character creation contest based on "The Image Nineties". Lots of contestants gave their entries Phlegmings.

Western Animation

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