In a conflict with the mystic villain, Necrodamus, during the event known as Inferno, Kang the Conqueror levels a ray blast at his enemy. And while you and I as comic book readers have seen our share of wild, creative sound effects associated with punches or weapons fire, letterer Joe Rosen gives Kang's ray a sound that may seem rather familiar:
Perhaps it's just Kang's way of letting us know that he'd rather have a much cooler time travelling ship.
Have a look at some other fun and out of the ordinary comics sound effects featured in a separate post by contributor Kev Stewart.
Thanks for that link CF, it was very amusing but Nightcrawler's "bamf" is a classic and is surely above criticism (and nobody's ever seen a teleportation so maybe it DOES go bamf). Kid Robson's blog recently had a clip of Roy Thomas talking about Conan and he (RT) said that his Conan stories never had any sound effects at all which I'd never even noticed - perhaps this shows that sound effects in comics aren't really necessary as nobody would ever have missed them if they hadn't been invented.
ReplyDeleteActually, Colin, I was thinking while writing about that Thor vs. Red Hulk story (which also was "soundless") how much better the story might have been with sound effects to punctuate the bold statements of the two characters. All the while, it felt to me like something was missing--probably because every Thor vs. Hulk story I'd read up to that point had a generous amount of awesome sound effects to make the match-up come across as more exciting--that each of them was going for broke, and neither was asking for quarter. Thomas may have been onto something with Conan, who wasn't super-powered and who didn't deliver blows with a "THOOOMM!"--but if a character is going to bring down a building with a punch, I want that punch to reverberate.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Comicsfan on this one. Every punch (Batman credits, anyone?) doesn't need a sound effect, but the building-fall-down-go-boom slams surely do. And where would the fun be if we didn't have the occasional webshooter "thwip", retractable claws "snikt" or a teleporting "bamf"?
ReplyDeleteAnd to extend your list of examples, Murray, we might also still be debating how Gwen Stacy died if it weren't for a helpful and well-timed sound effect. (Gee, I hope this doesn't start an avalanche of gruesome sound effects in future stories.)
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