Tuesday Tip: Writing The Soundtrack of a Comics

Every time a comics becomes an animated show, some long-time readers upon seeing it for the first time will say, "Huh?... That's not the voice I had in mind for [insert character name]." It's one of the magical dimensions of comic art! Graphic novels do have soundtracks, only they play in our mind's ear. The writer and the artist work together in making the otherwise silent book object turn into a decibel-filled experience. For the writer, this magic resides in crafting natural-sounding dialogues with unique voices distinguished by speech patterns, hints of accents, and authentic jargon. Listen to people speaking, pick up rhythms, inflections, and selectively hand them to your characters. Next, the writer provides the first draft (or first spelling) of sound effects (onomatopoeias) for those sounds that should break past a scene's normal auditory landscape. You can use conventional spellings (WHAM! POW! ZAP!) for typical sounds, but you're creative, right? So why not add your own sound effects to the sequential art soundbank?

Next tip: how does the artist transform marks on the page into sounds in our heads?