The Sleaze Castle Cipher

In the 1990s Gratuitous Bunny Comix, a small press in Newcastle, England, published a series called Sleaze Castle. The title alludes to Castle Leazes, the name of a dormitory complex at Newcastle University. By popular demand, anthologies of Sleaze Castle appeared in later years.

The series was written by Dave McKinnon and drawn by Terry Wiley. It was known for its unpredictable whimsy, satire, imagination, and philosophical exploration of the human experience. Its main characters were Jocasta Dribble, a rather commonplace university student majoring in Media Studies, and Pandadomino Quartile, a classmate of Jocasta's who was really the empress of a planet in another dimension and was temporarily marooned on Earth.

Sleaze Castle abounded with unexpected quirks. One was a cipher used on Panda's home planet for inscriptions and for the utterances of a species called Little Happy Creatures. These hyper-emotional beings looked like condoms with little arms and faces.

The Sleaze Castle cipher had the predictable effect of deterring readers who preferred a modern, efficient reading experience. To read the dialogue one was obliged to deduce the correspondence between the alphabet and the cipher characters, then refer to it to interpret the words.

To spare readers the deductive process, I present a key to the cipher here. The cipher has numerals but not punctuation marks. I omit characters that I do not know. Additions and corrections are welcome.





A 
B 
C 
D 
E 
F 



G 
H 
I 
J 
K 
L 



M 
N 
O 
P 
Q 
R 



S 
T 
U 
V 
W 
X 



Y 
Z 
1 
2 
3 
4 



5 
6 
7 
8 
9 
0

Col. George Sicherman [ HOME | MAIL ]