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Since everyone has been so nice and patient, I decided to upload two pages today. Next Monday we will go back to the one-page-a-day schedule.

For this page I want to talk about sound effects. Primarily, how we choose to represent them in the visual-arts.

As laughable as it is, when you're reading a comic and someone gets punched in the gut, you understand what noise they're supposed to make when the artist writes in "NYARGGH!" While sometimes sound-effects can be used as filler to take up space, other times they can add that little bit of oomph that a story needs. Words that represent sounds are called "onomatopoeia", which is a funny-sounding word in and of itself.

So we all know that bees go "buzz" and an old rocker goes "squeak", but what about those noises that don't have a solid word for them?

That's the trouble I ran into with this page. I knew I wanted to have some "readable" noises for the audience, so that they would know something is up. But when it came to writing those noises down, I had a dickens of a time deciding how to verbally 'portray' them. I could hear the noises in my head, but it took me about a half an hour of making them myself and writing down what I thought they sounded like before I could pin down some good words for the sound-effects in my head.

So what exactly made those noises? Well, you'll just have to keep on reading to find out....