Sound Effects & Comics

At the most recent TCAF, friend and fellow cartoonist Frank Cammuso and I got to talking about sound effects in comics and how they're just not used very much in the new "modern" style seen today in a lot of comics (Marvel ones in particular).

This style, which is all cinematic and photo-realistic, just doesn't lend itself to old school sound effects. I think some artists find them too cartoony - and don't fit in with the gritty, grim and dark look they're going for. To me though, this slavish devotion to realism in comics just results in sucking the life out of the drawings. It takes me completely out of the comic and the art looks dead on the page.

Frank Santoro did a recent post on this in Comics, Comics, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement with it all the way through.

Sound Effects and Joy
For me, sound effects are a great joy in comics. A great example of this of course is the spectacularly successfull Scott Pilgrim comics by Bryan Lee O'Malley. I can just picture O'Malley acting out some of the scenes and trying to figure out the funniest and best sound effect to put into a panel.

The current comic I'm working on about Canadian scientist Gerald Bull, is a historical non-fiction story, but I've found I'm using a lot of sound effects in it, and getting a big kick out of it. Do I think they take away from the story? Not at all, just the opposite in fact...

Here's a sampling from just the first few chapters...