Category Archives: OnomontoPOWia

I'd say that giant space-going chimp blimps that spit lasers -- literally -- accompanied by the following onomontoPOWia effects are right up there at the top of the Awesome List:

I don't know about you, but I can never get enough of space monkeys flinging their bodily excretions with a mighty "POOT" or "PTUI". That's the kind of thing that makes comics great, my friends.

(Image from “Rocket Raccoon”, Vol. 1, No. 3, ©1985, Marvel Comics Group.)

And lo, the faithful shall reach enlightenment through the sound of bullets firing from the breasts of the Skull God:

Apparently one of the world's largest religions was formed not when Siddhartha sat under a tree until he gained enlightenment, but when he popped up out of the ground, nipples a-blazing with gunfire. Good to know.

(Image from “What the –?!”, Vol. 1, No. 9, ©1990 Marvel Entertainment Group.)

Like a great Zen koan, "What is the sound of a three-toed hyper-strong blond-wig-wearing green-skinned Abominatrix jumping?" tickles your brain and sprains your consciousness into a higher plane of existence. Because let's face it, the fact is that there is no sound when you jump, only when you land. Fortunately "She-Hulk" characters are exempt from the stodgy and boring old rules of physics and acoustics, as we see here:

What's really neat is that there are two sounds to her normally soundless take-off, KIKA and BOOMP. I can almost sort of see how you'd get KIKA, assuming her three toes have really long nails that are clacking on the cement, even though that would be KLIKA if you think about it. Which I don't recommend you do, to be honest.

But they really lose me with the BOOMP. Again, if it were BOOM I could kind of squint my ears and imagine it's a sonic boom perhaps, the sound of her breaking the sound barrier at the beginning of her leap. But then, you wouldn't be able to hear her witty repartee about missing a soap opera. Or it could be the sound of air rushing in to fill the void she's suddenly vacated by hauling her enormous gamma-radiated carcass off the tarmac.

But BOOMP? No, that I completely don't understand unless it's a veiled reference to the fact that what Abominatrix is really missing on TV is an X-rated Betty Boop tribute of some sort. But that doesn't bear thinking about.

Note to all comics creators: If you have a female protagonist who is getting head-butted in a sensitive region, never ever ever use the following onomontoPOWia:

That is all.

Good onomontoPOWia should be like a strong spice in a main course -- present, but not overpowering, punchy without being dominating. In other words, the complete opposite of this panel from "Silver Star":

On one hand, you definitely get the sense of an overwhelming amount of noise, which may be what the team was going for. But it just ends up looking like visual word salad, conveying little impact at the expense of way too much real estate.

When a lithe, muscular, bald-pated outer-space super-powered individual goes through a pane of glass, it sounds like this:

But when a fat guy goes through an almost identical pane of glass in the very same comic, it sounds like this:

I am sure some fancy-pants acoustic engineer will saunter in here and make some mathematical arguments about sound waves and refractions through different cell types and whatnot, but at the end of the day I think we can all agree that what we need to settle this controversy once and for all is to throw more guys through windows.

Despite the fact that I live on a small ranch with lots of animals around, I had no idea that if you combined a sheep with a cow the resultant hybrid would transform from a placid, cud-chewing "moo cow" to the dreaded exploding "BaaaKow":

Now, thanks to comic books, I realize we fence the cows off from the sheep for a reason. What Darkstar was doing there during the unnatural congress between the sheep and the cow, however, I frankly don't want to know.

For this week's installment of onomontoPOWia, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at an actual published comic page with sound effects, and then without. "Showcase '93", issue 9 (©DC Comics) features a fight in a convention hall between Peacekeeper and some thugs from Viper (or maybe some other snake-themed group, it's hard to keep them all straight). Here it is as published, with sound effects intact:

And here it is with the sound effects removed via Photoshop:

You still get what's going on, but removing the element of sound (even if that sound is nothing more than additional lines and colors of ink on paper just like the character illustrations) greatly diminishes the impact of the action. In part this has to do with how our minds process comics panels.

Sound exists only in time. It is inherently dynamic, unable to exist as a static phenomenon. And yet comics are inherently static, still images on a printed page existing as-is regardless of how much (if any) time passes around them. Combining those two diametrically opposed elements greatly enhances comics' ability to trick our minds into believing that we are watching action, that what appears on the page is unfolding in time.

OnomontoPOWia is not unique in this ability, of course, but I believe it is one of the most powerful due to the unique nature of sound. When you see "THWAP!" you can't help but imagine you are hearing it out loud, carrying the images associated with it forward as well. Like a movie without a soundtrack, the medium of comics can still be effective without onomontoPOWia, but it's a much different experience.