The Lettering List 008 - Sound of Silence
Welcome to The Lettering List. I'm Hass, a professional comics letterer, and in each edition of this newsletter, I throw up some lettering samples and then talk a little bit about the craft of lettering comic books.
Without much more fanfare, here's some balloons that have been across the desk before the Christmas break:
Recently I've been thinking about sound in comics, springing off of the thought about why we don't assign every action a sound effect when we make comics. Obviously it'd just be way too cluttered, because all sound effects are going to take up space. And actually what a sound effect does in comics isn't actually create a sound -- obvious, but worth mentioning. It just draws your attention to something and can help amplify a moment by making the readers actually "read" something. Like if you added a liquid-looking SPLURT! sound effect to someone squeezing a spot, what you're actually doing is getting a reader to read that the spot is SPLURTING out. You'll maybe heard the sound in your head, but really it's about creating the "sense" of that action through a drawing or image of a word. It's why we kind of want the sound effects to have specific shapes, too, because the visual element of a sound effect is also really important.
As a really simple idea, those two BEEPs feel different. One (to me) reads more like a electronic beep, and the other maybe an animal or like a clown nose or something more organic and less robotic.
This is a long-winded way of getting to a point, which was that we use "sounds" in comics to draw attention to specific things. That implies that actually there are other sounds in a comic panel, we just aren't specifically hearing them. Like when an artist drops out a background to draw attention to something specific, they aren't indicating that the world just vanished, but rather creating focus or changing pacing or whatever else. If you extrapolate that the idea of sound, you can argue that actually all comics panels are FULL of sounds, it's just most of it isn't really important to the moment or story or worth placing and disrupting the reader flow.
Which then brings up the idea of conveying actual silence, because if we accept that the world within comic panels is full of sound (we're just not specifically being drawn to it), then a panel without dialogue or sound effects isn't actually silent, and I don't believe that (context-depending) most readers would specifically acknowledge a panel as being specifically "silent".
Now, there are a lot of caveats to this, obviously. But if you take a standard exposition panel of, say, a downtown city with cars driving past and lots of people walking around, that doesn't say "silence" to a reader. It doesn't specify a particular sound, either, but it doesn't read as the absence of sound.
This is a quick example from the recent Ultimate Spider-Man, by Hickman, Checchetto, Wilson and Petit. That first panel is silent, but it's not silent. The implication is not for us to read that image and assume the absence of any sound whatsoever.
So if that's the case, what can you do to actually show silence? Well! This is what I thought was so much fun to consider, because one good way to do it is to letter the silence.
Here's a classic. Having an ellipses in a balloon, pointing to the character who is being silent, is a great way to show that they aren't speaking. How fun, right?! You can use a speech balloon to show that someone isn't speaking. And it's pretty effective as a tool to draw attention to the lack of dialogue in a panel. There are a tonne of variations on this theme, too.
You could throw in a little squiggle, which I like as a sort of like, "--blp--" kinda thing, like something caught in the throat of someone who can't speak.
A little cross can do the same job, but you can also switch up the tail for a panel as a kind of visual differentiator for that balloon. If you're always doing thick pointer tails, and then you have this one balloon with a line tail, maybe it sounds different, it doesn't have a full volume, whatever.
There's a huge caveat to this, which is that the panels themselves can also show silence. If you have a three panel sequence of someone's face, and panels one and three have dialogue, but panel two doesn't, then yeah, it implies silence, or lack of dialogue. The juxtaposition of those moments will showcase silence. So by no means is adding a balloon the only way to do this, but I think it's a fun concept consider.
Anyway, that's all I've got for you this time, just a little something to mull over.
Hass
Comics featured in the Lettering List this edition: The Cull, Batman: City of Madness, The Deviant, [Unnanounced]!
Sneaky plug for my graphic novel, THE UNLIKELY STORY OF FELIX & MACABBER - created with Juni Ba. It's available to buy right now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unlikely-Story-Felix-Macabber/dp/1506738222