018 #blogjune 2020 - 'Badyear' to be continued

018 #blogjune 2020

“At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Song of the Blog:
"Eighteen - I get confused every day
Eighteen - I just don't know what to say
Eighteen - I gotta get away"
- Alice Cooper

In 1985, the year I became a 'man' of 18, I was still an avid comic book reader - and got the EPPO magazine every week even though I lived on a social security benefit whilst attempting to live on my own AND maintain to go to school. It was a year of many changes and even my beloved comic book magazine decided to become known as EPPO WORDT VERVOLGD (To be continued)...

I sure wasn't a bad year for comics... I always enjoyed the BRIAN and the BRAINBOX stories from Jan van Haasteren or just a bath joke ( bad joke ) from Gerald Leever ;) and even whilst my personal life at times felt like a water balloon had popped - the weekly adventures of my favourite heroes helped me continue every week in 1985.

There were some excellent covers of the General again in 1985 ( if you want to see more of Peter de Smet's work check out this great Facebook page by Ralph Brendt: "De Generaal en ander werk van Peter de Smet". I will be doing a bit about some of his other work myself in an upcoming blog. Of course I loved the FRANKA covers the most, as a big Henk Kuijpers fan - but THE cover of 1985 would have to be the first WORDT VERVOLGD one - with some of the images of Storm, Franka etc and Sjef van Oekel on top of it all. I did a vlog about that issue last year. I had deleted all my youtube videos since, but have uploaded this one again for the blog.

009 - #blogjune 006 - The Sound of Silence

"If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on."  - Alfred Hitchcock

*In case anyone thought it "could be, could be not or couldn't rightly say" - the left panel is from Asterix!

One of my favourite words in the "English" language is onomatopoeia - .
As a cartoonist, or comic book artist, putting sounds into words is an important element of the story telling process. What word do you choose to portray certain sounds. It can sometimes be quite a tough choice, because certain words COULD conjure up a different experience of sound from person to person. So, one hopes to make a sound decision.
Most people will be familiar with most of the common variations of comic book sounds, your POWs (incl. KAPOW), BAMs, ZAPs and BOOMs. And my personal favourite WHAM... Ok, yes - also because I was a big fan of their music in the 80s *smile*

Reading a comic is mostly a silent event - in these colder winter days, sitting in the warmest spot in the house with maybe the sound of thunder and the rain on the roof. So, the story itself needs to be able to create convincing sound effects enabling us to (as Scott McCloud described it so well) "LISTEN WITH OUR EYES"
We can all appreciate a good BANG...

Both Scott McCloud's "Making Comics" and "Understanding Comics" are amazing books.

People having grown up up with Tintin books will be familiar with the exploding mushrooms in the story of the Shooting Star. Those BOOMS are quite subdued compared to some of the other exploding sounds in comics, especially the American super hero ones. It's can also be an issue with different languages. For instance the Dutch word for BOOM is BOEM (because BOOM actually means TREE in the Netherlands) - then it is >BOUM< if you’re French, or >BOM< if you’re Swedish and >BUM< if you’re Italian!

I like it when they get creative and make up words that aren't your normal stock standard variety of usual comic book sounds... From simpler words like WHUMP, KRAK, and BUDABOOM .. to the more complicated versions like:

TWAFWOKK, SKRATOOM, KRAKA-KWOOM, KKRAKKA DOOOUM, BRKERBRABOOM or KRRKKKOOOOOO...

All these remind me of the great sounding words imitating the sound of thunder from Finnegans Wake by Irish writer James Joyce - like this one:
Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebble-nonthedubblandaddydoodled.

Some of these panels were taken from THOR comic - the God of Thunder!