Sound in Narration

            Even after the speech bubble became conventional in German comics and words made their migration from beneath the image to within the image—though still separate from what Carrier calls the image’s “picture space” (4), i.e. the diegetic world of the comic—sound effects were often not included in a given comic’s images.  This was especially true of many adventure comics published during the 1950s and 1960s. 

            Hansrudi Wäscher’s Sigurd, as one might imagine, is filled with medieval derring-do, madcap rescues and escapes, and breathtaking swordfights—all of which looks like it should make considerable noise.  But while Sigurd has no trouble issuing orders and even carrying on entire conversations while locked in mortal combat, the sounds of battle are notably absent:

The action taking place here must be violently loud, yet the only sounds represented visually on the page are spoken utterances.  (The narration in the first panel is separate even from this—while Sigurd’s compatriots can hear what he says, the narrator’s lines, we imagine, are “heard” only by us—they are visually as well as aurally nondiegetic.)  Each panel is certainly crowded enough without the addition of sound effects; still, this stylistic choice strikes me as odd, and I have as yet found no explanation for this choice.  It cannot be an issue of unfamiliarity with the use of sound effects in comics, since other comics from the same time period (like Fixi und Foxi, which we will examine in another section) make liberal use of such effects.

            In Helmut Nickel’s Robinson, the sounds associated with the content of a given panel sometimes appear in the narration, though not nearly every panel is accompanied by a description of the sounds being made therein.  On the following page, for example, sound is mentioned by the narrator only in panels two and four:

In the second panel, after Robinson has set his trap, the narrator tells us (the readers) what Robinson hears: “Da brüllt ein Tigerruf in unmittelbarer Nähe!”  In the fourth panel, the narrator gives us exactly what sounds are occurring in the course of the action: “Da—ein Knacken, ein schwirrender Laut und gleich darauf ein grauenhaftes, grellendes Angst- und Wutgeheul” (emphasis mine).  The images in Robinson aren’t doing much beyond illustrating a single moment in time: the image accompanying the narration in the fourth panel only shows the tiger already mortally wounded; the narrator must fill us in on everything that happened between the image in panel three and the image in panel four (the tiger rustling the underbrush, then leaping out at Robinson, and finally setting off the trap).  This is an extreme form of the visual closure that McCloud talks about (see Understanding Comics 63): so much time passes between images that the narration must tell us everything, including what sounds we should be hearing.  Although Nickel does use speech bubbles when his characters are speaking, the illustrative nature of the images more closely resembles older Bildergeschichten than modern comics.

            A few recent comics exhibit a similar approach to sound, making it the job of the narrator to describe a given noise (or to at least mention that a sound is occurring), as in Anke Feuchtenberger and Katrin de Vries’s DIE HURE H:

Thanks to the narration, we know that the titular character is following the sound of someone crying.  The narration states that this noise is audible above the “Lärm” of the other women—which, in turn, is again signaled only by the narration and not by a sound effect within the image.  The portrayal of sound here is very close to the portrayal of sound in a novel: we are told, not shown, what sounds accompany which image.  DIE HURE H relies heavily on narration to carry its plot, and in this way more closely resembles older Bildergeschichten than newer graphic novels (though the same is decidedly not true for the images).

            Many examples of Sprechblasenliteratur, then, purposefully leave visual depictions of sound out of their images, even if they include speech bubbles.  In the case of Die hure h, this is a clear stylistic choice.  Of course, the absence of sound effects from adventure comics like Sigurd and Robinson is clearly a stylistic choice, as well, but one whose motives are, as previously mentioned, somewhat less clear.  Perhaps they did not want their adventures to appear too “childish,” since sound effects were much more prominent in Kauka’s Fixi und Foxi and the imported Mickey Mouse cartoons.  More research into this phenomenon is warranted.