Visualizing sound effects was one of the new things I learned when I started to work on this project.
Until then, I had only ever worked on scripts for movies, in which the sounds were not necessarily the main focus. I did have some experience with Foley (adding sound in post-production), where I had to consciously think about how individual sounds would sound to be able to reproduce them — but adapting this to the comic medium was, of course, a whole new challenge.
With onomatopoeia (written sound effects) in comics, it’s obviously not just what is written that counts, but even more how it looks!
That’s where Buddy, our letterer, came into play. Together, we decided on a gritty, slightly old-school look for the font, used to visualize the sounds, to match the mood of the story.
At the points where the sounds played a more important role in the composition of the panels, Amy integrated the sound effects directly into the panels themselves. For example, when the sound is supposed to be too “loud” for the frame of the panel to be able to hold it in.
For the sound in dialogues, Buddy also worked with diverse speech bubble designs:
For examples, he varied borders, shapes, or colors of the backgrounds of the speech bubble to emphasize specific emotions.
If the context was clear, I simply sent Buddy the dialogue and left the interpretation up to him.
Only when I felt the dialogue was not self-explanatory did I clarify the emphasis and emotion with bold words or stage directions.
I avoided thought bubbles when writing the story – telling the story this way felt more natural to me, probably due to my past in film.