Page Commentary No. 74 (Patreon)

Psu: Gunwild at it again with very specific sound effects.

Gunwild: "KWA-DRANGL" is pretty obvious. "LANGELAAN" was the writer of The Fly, and I think the person to invent the word "teleportation."

Psu: It's a bit of a long walk! But I'm glad I remembered that. I don't use sound effects all that often. I like them, but I don't exactly have the best talent for them. Instead I try my best to make it so that you can imagine the sound without seeing the literal word. If you don't mind, I'm probably gonna go into a little spiel about comic craft.

Gunwild: I like those! I learn things.

Psu: Sound effects are very cool, and really good sound effects are just fun to read and to visualize. But I as a reader, can find myself reading sound effects like they're "dialog." My eye gets drawn to them and then I read and I pass over the rest of the art and onto the next panel. This doesn't always happen mind you, a great sound effect reads great and is integrated into the art effectively. But a poor sound effect, ones that sometimes happen on my pages for instance, can just serve not as a distraction but just a kind of bridge where my eye goes to read it and passes over the art and goes to the next word balloon in sequence.

Psu: Instead, what I like to do comes from how I would read lots of Japanese manga in books where they didn't redraw the sound effects. I was never reading the word, but I would still get the feel and often I could imagine or feel the sound regardless of the sfx being legible or not. And because words for me, can act like a bridge of stuff walking over the art, if I don't have any words to distract me then I'll mentally linger on the art in a scene.

Psu: So, often in a comic, I would use sound effects to do few things that help me tell the story. I use an SFX to describe a sound that is very specific and might not be apparent just from looking at something, what it sounds like. Two, I could use a sound effect to "animate" a thing. Like, it's a good way to show a button press happened by having a little "click" sound effect like you see here in panel 4. And the third thing I like to use it for is for describing something happening just off camera. A door slamming shut or a crash through the window in another room are classic uses of sound effects pulling narrative weight.

Psu: If this page were in color, I imagine I wouldn't use as many sound effects as I did because the colors would carry a lot of the weight. Langelaann would stick around though cause that's just unique and weird and fun.

Gunwild: I think I've mentioned it before, but my much less evolved take on SFX is that I sometimes try to do funny ones like in Marvel's Incredible Hercules. Everyone go read Incredible Hercules!

Psu: Those are good. But sometimes, the Sound Effect IS the illustration in the panel. That's how important they are in a lot of those scenes. If you wanna look at living words in a page, look at nearly anything by Will Eisner.

Gunwild: Or if you need it explained to you why that's good, do like me and read Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art.

Psu: We went off on a technical tangent there. Anyway, story notes. I love the jelly crew here. It's great to see Mercy's skill. The second commenter on the page totally called us out on our surprise for the next page.

Gunwild: I know. We've talked recently about how long-form stories don't get a ton of chances for slow burn reveals anymore, because the audience are all going to talk to each other with all their guesses, and statistically, somebody's gotta get it right.

Psu: I'm starting to figure that if the story isn't worth reading without the mystery, then it might need some reconsidering anyway. And that even includes mystery stories!

Gunwild: Or you have to make it so that your reveal ties up more than one thing in a satisfying way.