Meanwhile the caption at the top spells out what we’re seeing, employing powerful words like “fury”, “thundering manpower”, and “hammer”. All of which sets us up nicely for the ensuing onomontoPOWia. Perhaps a WHAM or the traditional POW? Or, more daringly, a BOOM or SHA-KOOOM?

No. Oh no. Because in a world with ninja tanks and villains slapped silly, a world where the two most powerful heroes get flung around the skies by their necks, limbs flapping like chickens spun at the end of a farmer’s arm, “thundering manpower” goes “POOOOFF”.

Don’t let yourself get distracted by the seething mass of pus-filled bulges that constitute his “muscles” or his grotesque anatomical proportions or the pathetic inking or the lackluster color or the lingering questions of where his other hand is and what happened to the handle of that gun. Because that would be a rookie mistake.

No no, the real star of this little tableaux is the onomontoPOWia. Specifically, look how big his shouted “ME!” is compared to the BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA of the gun’s discharge.

If a guy brings a gun that big to a fight and it’s quiet enough to not even be shushed by a librarian, something is definitely amiss. Image characters of the Nineties were all about the macho, and clearly this guy’s trying, but he’s never going to make the big leagues with a wimpy weapon like that. I mean, a flying headband and skintight faceless ski mask and obnoxious musculature and bad attitude and gravity-defying shoulder pads will only get you so far, you know? At some point you have to fire that boomstick and when you do, you’d better be able to bring it, bucko!

Although, if guys with “Little Man Syndrome” buy big flashy cars to overcompensate, maybe he’s buying a teeny tiny sounding gun to … undercompensate?

Nah. No one in the Image Nineties would be able to resist showing off an … asset … as big as that would imply. On the contrary, they’d be hanging a dozen pouches off of it and giving it its own title.

(From “Bloodstrike” number 13, ©1994, Image Comics.)

I’m just saying, if you’re NOT getting smushed by a giant stone vagina, you’ve got no business going “KARRUNT” with those kinds of visual effects on it.

Also, I would pay cash money for a comic book featuring as its main character a Thing-like ambulatory pile of hard-hitting stone genitalia. Because that would be awesome.

The big jagged-outline visual effects we’ve come to expect are already present (filled with yellow, usually), but the accompanying sound effects owe more to the craft of the letterer than the artist. In fact, I believe the letterer was responsible for filling in these elements, for many many years, which might explain their spartan appearance.

I also began to notice how rarely sound effects were used at all. You could almost guarantee a gun firing would get a “BANG” or “POW”, but seldom anything else that wasn’t very loud indeed in the real world. You can go for pages and pages without any onomontoPOWia at all, which to modern eyes is quite strange.

The medium progressed quickly, though, as you can see from this panel from 1947′s “Cowpuncher”:

The simple typographical black words are now more boldly drawn and filled with a dramatic red, slanting into the frame on the same trajectory of the bullet. Compare that to the earlier “Smacko” and you can see how much more effective the later treatment is.

Eventually, of course, onomontoPOWia would become so ubiquitous that you couldn’t avoid it, crammed into almost every panel, and immortalized in the “Batman” television show with every punch or kick. I’m glad we’ve toned that down since then, incorporating the sense of hearing more fully into the page rather than making it awkward either by its absence or its omnipresence.

Going through these old comics is really amazing, I love seeing how the medium has evolved in the last fifty years. Do yourself a favor and head on over while you can still download them without having to register!

On the other hand, maybe that’s why Wolverine’s head wing thingies are standing up so tall and straight.

Both are one letter off from common sound effects, and the effect is jarring. POW and BASH I can mentally translate into something I might hear. But adding a letter to turn each from a sound effect to an actual word decreases their ability to convey meaning. You can’t help but bring up the words’ definitions in your mind when you read them, and instantly you’re not in the realm of the auditory but rather the physical in one case and emotional in the other. You want to keep your reader in the moment, not break them out of it thinking, “That’s not what a plow is …”

Keep it simple, folks; sometimes more is less.

I don’t care how much fine china he hurls, there’s nothing scary about a man with feet that small, stuffed into high-heeled cowboy boots, mounted by highwater, rolled-cuff blue jeans. Combine that with a “threat” to “throw lead” with, one assumes, the same limp-wristed lack of athleticism as the glass in question, and I think involuntary bladder-loosening is the last thing we have to worry about. Laughter, yes. Wetting pants with a “tinkle” sound, no.

I love everything about this panel, from the awesome dialog (“A cloth-covered sledgehammer comes up from the floor …” — what the hell was his fist doing on the floor?!) to the look on the face of the outlaw, to how the sheriff guts out his apparently broken and/or dislocated shoulder to deliver a punch. And all done without the need for an exclamation point! I mean, come on, I’ve used two so far just in this one post, and yet you can cold-cock a guy into bug-eyed, broken-armed, raccoon-mascara-wearing submission without even getting out of a declarative mode.

Regardless, it makes for a very surreal visual. You’ve got this very savage beating taking place, but the onomontoPOWia makes it all seem very genteel, as if they’ll retire to tea and crumpets after the blood soaks into the sawdust. Just awesome.

The panel is from Avon Comics’ 1947 comic, “Cowpuncher” #1, courtesy of the awesome “Golden Age Comics” site. I’ve been having a blast going through these old issues from the dawn of comic books’ exploding popularity, before the Comics Code Authority intervened to put a bullet through the medium’s head. They’ve got romance comics, war comics, talking animal comics, pirate comics, cowboy comics, you name it and you’ll find some really cool examples of the genre. It’s fascinating to immerse yourself in this era of the medium’s development, and to appreciate just how pointed the visual language has gotten in the intervening sixty years.

I’d write more, but I have to go outside and practice punching things with a period instead of an exclamation point. I just hope I don’t have to dislocate my shoulder to get it done.

I believe I’m on record as being opposed to onomontoPOWia that are nothing more than common English words used as sounds, but this is easily the most egregious and least effective example I’ve seen to date. Come on, The Bronx isn’t even a city, it’s just a borough, you know? If you’re going to hack your way out of coming up with an actual effect, at least go for something incorporated.

Plus, it’s a crappy sound effect. When a guy with metal fists hits a giant hairy gay ape-man/galactic vampire from outer space wearing a sporty blue cloth tunic, the sound you’d get would be nothing like “BRONXX”. Off-hand, I can’t think of anything that would make that noise, to be honest. If you’re going to lame out with a city-based word, right here in Texas we could offer him “meXIa!” or “BANGs!” or “FROGNOT!”

I have to be honest with you, I’d love to see a comic book use “FROGNOT” in some way. Villain name, onomontoPOWia, the call sign for Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, I don’t care, just give me some Frognot!

First I want to highlight how his incorporation of onomontoPOWia into the actual word balloons themselves brings even the dialog to life:

You rarely see this technique, probably because it’s so easy to do poorly. And when done poorly, it really breaks down the third wall and destroys the reading experience. Done well, though, it’s very powerful; I feel like I can almost touch the words coming out of The Shrewmanoid’s pointy-toothed mouth. Were they left simply as computer-rendered text, you’d lose a lot of the richness you get from the varied colors and style treatments, that extra sense of just how nuts this guy is. Even little things like the color choices for the words are good here, helping to sell tonal qualities that you can normally only get through actually, you know, hearing.

You see the same sort of thing at work in the next panel, although the bulk of the audio storytelling here falls to the more traditional sound effects coming from the giant mutant creatures:

You’re probably not going to see “HHAWRSSH” or “GRAUGH” in other comics, but they don’t seem too artificial or forced like a lot of the stuff I read. Partly, I suspect, that’s due to Adams’ integration of the onomontoPOWia into the planning of the panel itself. When you know ahead of time (by virtue of being the sole illustrator on the job) that the giant rat mutant is going to be making a sound, you can match the audio to the facial expression so they’re in harmony. Contrast that to a penciller just being told “There’ll be some sound here” (if that) and having to wing it, and the effect only getting added later during lettering. Note that even the contours of the word balloon help sell the maniacal laughter; Adams is completely in control of the visual vocabulary he’s using to tell this story, and it shows.

Finally, I want to show how well onomontoPOWia can be used to help propel a panel forward in time. Remember, all comics are static images of kinetic moments and onomontoPOWia is the only tool the creator has for trying to portray something that ordinarily exists only in time — sound. Watch how Adams is able to take that disadvantage and turn it around to give life and movement to the scene here:

The combination of the changing size of the “SPUK” sounds, aligned with the smoke contrail and the brilliantly subtle color gradient from lighter to darker orange, help drive home the feeling that Monkeyman and O’Brien are hurtling directly towards you. It’s like cognitive kung-fu, forcing your brain to put the figures at each stage of the timeline being hinted at here, subconsciously making you do the work of assembling the little movie in your head. It’s brilliant, and I love it — motion through motionless, sound through static, dynamism through stasis. That’s comics, folks!

I also want to point out that Adams doesn’t have to go overboard with the background to sell these panels. The burden of conveying just enough realism falls on the shoulders of the figures and the onomontoPOWia, particularly in that second panel. Other than the crashing airfoil and the tops of a couple of buildings, you pretty much just have a blue plane there. But it works. And the reason it works is that Arthur understands panel composition, how to put everything just where it needs to be to make a powerful and effective scene.

Contrast that mastery with the following two panels from Image Comics’ “Brigade”, published just three years earlier:

Just like in the earlier example, you’ve only got a plain colored background in the two panels, but what a difference in storytelling impact! The onomontoPOWia here is artificial and incidental, standing apart from the action rather than being integrated into it. Because of that it comes off as lame and unnecessary, detracting from the action instead of enhancing it. In the top panel you have a color gradient just like in the Adams example, but here it serves to call attention to the words. Adams uses the effect to help sell the idea that the sound is coming closer and closer to the user, leveraging our instinctive visual interpretation of perspective. In the Image effort, the gradient’s just there because, hey, cool Photoshop effect!

I’m not even going to get into the Grand Canyon-sized talent gap between the figure-drawing ability of the two artists. It’s embarrassing, and I frankly don’t know if I have a harder time believing that Image actually charged people money for this amateurish, hackish crap or that people actually went ahead and paid for it anyway.

Look, do yourself a favor next time you’re in your local comics shop or half priced book store, and find some Arthur Adams work. The guy’s brilliant, and your time hunting through the back issues box will be well rewarded by panels like what you’ve seen here — fun, entertaining, professional comics from someone in full command of the entire visual toolchest that makes the medium so amazing.

(First three images ©1996, Arthur Adams, “Monkeyman and O’Brien”, No. 1. Story and art, Arthur Adams; lettering by L. Lois Buhalis; coloring by Laura Allred.
Last image ©1993, Rob Liefeld, “Brigade” No. 3. Pencils by Marat Mychaels; lettering by Kurt Hathaway; “color design” by Brian Murray; inks by Paul Scott and Norm Rapmund. Yes, it took TWO people to ink that stuff, and still that’s as good as they could make it.)