Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Sounds Of Violence: Textualized Sound In Frank Miller’S Sin City And Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Sam Boer

2017 Undergraduate Awards

Though graphic novels are slowly being accepted into the world of academic criticism, one fundamental aspect of the medium has been consistently ignored, dismissed, and ridiculed as a crude necessity: textualized sound. Visual onomatopoeias, most recognizably depicted as sound effects for gunshots, car chases, and the like, have a long history in the medium of comics. Though these textualized sounds may have originated as a device of necessity—a clumsy means of employing sound into a “mono-sensory medium” (to quote Scott McCloud)—the implementation of onomatopoeia in comics has become an integral device in defining an author’s style and heightening their work. …