Frozen Music On The Comics Page

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Here are a couple of the things I’ve been thinking about this week.

In this letter:

• Sound effects in comics, among other things

• Night things

• The News

OPERATIONS

SOUND EFFECTS AND OTHER SILENCES

I’ve never really used sound effects in comics much. I don’t like them. As a kid, they fascinated me, but after a certain age they started to take me out of the storytelling, so I’ve tried to avoid them. I was part of the generations that helped kill the sound effect and the thought balloon, I guess.

Also, both tools had peaks. The moment in LORD HORROR where Horror recoils from Hitler, teeth grit, with the single thought balloon - “…SYPHILIS!” - probably cannot be beaten. Similarly, while his peers in the great graphic novel surge of the Eighties were grappling with grids and durational works, Howard Chaykin was doing this:

I was a fourteen year old English boy when I read this, and I didn’t get that the sound effect was a reference:

Guns that went “Papa Ooh Mau Mau.”

Howard Chaykin thought a lot about sound effects, and letterer Ken Bruzenak re-invented the sound effect as graphic element.

Wanna know about Ken Bruzenak? In this bit, two characters switch to speaking Russian to confound their monoglot captor:

Remember, this is the early Eighties, and hand-lettering an English-intelligible faux-Cyrillic is a serious flex. Also, who would have thought of that?

(He even had different sounds for landline phones and carphones. He thought about the sounds of his world..)

This came to mind because I noticed today it’s been thirteen years since I wrote one of the forewords to the Definitive Edition of AMERICAN FLAGG! (Michael Chabon did the other one.)

Here’s another thing. Bold type in speech balloons. There was a time we all did it. Alan Moore became expert at bold type emphases, because he wanted to control the way you heard the dialogue. (He even used it to approximate American accents, for example the American way of emphasising the surname and softening the first name.)

That’s another thing that started to bug me towards the end of the Nineties, but I didn’t see a way around it. Until Garth, from the start of PREACHER, started dropping bold text entirely. And suddenly the page read much cleaner, and much more like book prose. Where the writer doesn’t tell you how to read it. Therefore the sound of the text comes from you, and you invest more of yourself in the reading. It was a brilliant solution and I stole it as soon as I could. (You’ll see bold text slowly phase out during TRANSMETROPOLITAN, for instance.)

The thing about comics is, if you’ve established a tone where there are giant slabs of display lettering everywhere, you can absolutely have the word PURSUIT as a giant graphic behind two helicopters reduced down to icons.

This was all happening early in the same period as Miler’s RONIN and DARK KNIGHT, Moore/Bissette/Totleben on SWAMP THING and Moore and Miller on WATCHMEN, Spiegelman’s MAUS, Talbot completing LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, all the stuff from the Eighties in the Anglo-American form that we came to venerate. But Chaykin was zigging when pretty much everyone else was zagging. Yes, the sexual politics and identity politics didn’t age well, it’s forty years old and it wasn’t politically correct back then. Look at the work itself. It’s a hell of a ride, for one thing, and for another it’s full of tools we don’t use much any more, if at all.

ORBITAL

NIGHT THINGS

The Last Ambient Hero gifted me their new piece, which is a recording of a long live performance.

It reminds me of the first time I saw Philip Jeck play live. I stood by the door for part of it, and Kode9 walked by and asked me how “Phil” was doing. All I could say was, “he’s haunting the room.” While being a different kind of musician, the Hero does a similar thing here. Live, it must have been massive: the space fills with ocean and clouds. Numinous and lovely. You can stream the whole thing here on Bandcamp for free.

I was thinking about this the other day, and went to have a look for it. It was aired on BBC2. Clive Barker, Lisa Tuttle, Roger Corman, John Carpenter, Ramsay Campbell and Peter Atkins sit around a dinner table and talk about horror storytelling. Sometimes getting deep into the mechanics of it. Note literary horror writer Ramsay Campbell enjoying splatter and Roger Corman talking about subtext.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

This piece, “The Reward,” is newly created for Orbital Operations. Her other work is available as prints from the lordess.io store.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

• Looking back on September 2024 on the log

• Crabapple & Leavitt’s SCARLETT TAKES MANHATTAN

• Notes on a whistlestop tour of the end of the Roman Republic

• Notes on THE WHITE BOOK by Nobel winner Han Kang

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Listen. Maybe you’re going to try and make something or do something this week. And that voice is going in the back of your head, saying you’re going to fail and it’s not going to be good enough. That voice is the enemy of making things and it is an arsehole. Nobody makes anything perfectly. Perfect isn’t interesting. The flaws and the rough edges are what make it yours, and they teach you something. So take a breath and go ahead. See you next week.

W