Hearing Comics: Sound and Sequential Art

While onomatopoeic sound effects such as ‘BIFF!’ and ‘BAM!’ are so heavily associated with comics that they ‘have become a kind of cliché’, it is generally accepted that the medium is a silent one, and that comics do not stimulate our sense of hearing directly, working only in the realm of what Don Ihde has called the ‘auditory imagination’*. Yet comics do have perceivable auditory characteristics. The turning of the pages and the opening and closing of the work, for example, generate sounds that tell us about the modification of the comic as an object and emphasise the temporal nature of the reading experience. More consciously deployed sounds, such as those that are found in comics with attached records or CDs, can also serve to modify the nature of the reader-text interaction and renegotiate relationships of power. For example, where “purely” visual works allow the reader full control over the pace and direction of reading, sounds can return some measure of power over these elements to the creator and allow them to speed up or slow down the reading process as they choose.

In this presentation, I will consider some of the ways in which sounds affect the nature of the comic and the reading experience, drawing on a range of examples to do so. Examples will include Robot Media’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim for mobile platforms, Marvel/Golden Records’ Marvel Age Comic Spectaculars and Dominique Grange and Tardi’s 1968-2008... N’Effacez Pas Nos Traces!.

* - Covey, Suzanne, ‘Beyond the Balloon: Sound Effects and Background Text in Lynn Johnson’s For Better or For Worse’ in ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Vol.2, No.2 <http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v2_2/covey/> (2010-12-08). Also: Ihde, Don. ‘Auditory Imagination’ in The Auditory Culture Reader. Eds. Michael Bull and Les Back. Great Britain: Berg, 2003 (2005), pp.61-66. Quotation from p.61.