Ideophones are words that depict sensory imagery, including sound, movement, vision, smell, taste, tactility, bodily sensationsand mental states. They are argued to be both iconic and conventionalized in nature: although their forms are assumed to resemble their meanings, different languages conventionalize different forms for the same meanings. An object hitting water says splash in English, plask in Swedish and loisk in Finnish. Ideophonic items are frequent in comics, where they are used to add dimensions of sound, movement etc. (SWISH!!! RING!! RING!!) to staticimages. An examination of comic strips reveals how ideophonic items fall on a continuum, ranging fromclearly onomatopoeic and imitative itemsto items created from originally arbitrary words. It is not clear, however,what processes are used, when such items are created. The Finnish examples imur imur, ravis ravis and nipist appear to be formed from the nouns i.mu.ri ‘vacuum cleaner’, ra.vis.tus ‘a shaking’ or ni.pis.tys ‘a pinch’ or the verbsi.mu.roi.da ‘to vacuum’, ra.vis.taa ‘to shake’ or ni.pis.tää ‘to pinch’. The resulting items are not ‘proper’ words on any account, and none of the‘proper’ word-formation processes in Finnish can produce them. In the Swedish versions, the translated items are similar in form to the nouns sug, skak and nyp which are related to the verbs suga, skaka and nypa. The imperative forms of verbs may or may not look identical to the nouns. Given the correspondence in form and meaning between the Swedish noun and verb forms, it is difficult to ascertain what forms underlie the translation. The matter is not limited to translations, as the same observations holdfor comic strips that are originally written in Swedish. In this paper, we examine comic strips written in Finnish and Swedish, to identify what types of words give rise to formations such as above; what such formations do in the comic strips; and what processes appear to be employed.We focus on comics originally written in Finnish and Swedish but will also make observations on how these items are translated between the two languages.