PROTEGE

Comic book sound effects are funky things. Some writers embrace them in all their KER-CHOW glory, others ignore them altogether. I gave this weighty matter a lot of thought after many tweaks and re-designs of the sound effect on pg 9 — which I ultimately decided to go without.

Yeah, it’s not the greatest BRAOOOM I’ve ever seen. But regardless of the design, I felt like the text kept getting in the way of the art in this panel and didn’t add any impact to the image. As I’m learning, a big part of lettering is like sound in film — you’re doing a good job if viewers don’t notice. In film, if you wonder why the dialogue sounds so garbled or why there’s a random buzz in the background, the sound guy has failed. Same thing in comics if the reader wonders why a word balloon is hanging across a character’s face or a sound effect doesn’t fit within the layout of a panel.

To read an interesting post dissecting comic book sound effects by a dude much smarter than me, check out Martyn Pedler’s great article in Full Stop.