Music in comics?

I am a lover of Comics. I am also a lover of Films. Since I was young, these two mediums have helped develope my creative sensibilities and style.

Much like other writers before me like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, I have sought to combine the two. In short, making the comic medium more cinematic. This has been done before in books like Watchmen and The Authority what with their use of angled and wide shots, recurring visual motifs and word/visual play, but one thing has always stumped me. Music.

How do you put music into a purely visual medium? It's been done before: oddly enough by Alan Moore ( in Watchmen and V For Vendetta respectively), but I don't really think that's the only way to do it, or even the best way. So I ask you fellow Tropers. What are your opinions on the subject?

My opinion? Well, it really depends on the reader's knowledge. As in he's got to know the song. So, I don't really like when they use it that much.

But, if you're writing a webcomic you can embed a song into the page and give the reader a cue to play it or something. Not the greatest idea ever, but if it's twitched and changed, it can bring some interesting results.

I know this blogger who actually does something like that when he writes articles. Sadly is in Spanish.

I've had the same problem too. One of the characters in Forgotten Lore is supposed to be a member of a band, I thought about doign atleast one story focused on the band. I probably wouldn't spend much time on the music itself as music doesn't really work in comics. Then there's the fact that I have a lot of ideas for a music-based gags that would be very hard to implement in a comic, such as the Herald trying to convince one of the protagonists to essentially sell his soul to him through a song and dance number, or Zaran singing "traditional folksongs", which all seem to center around soldiers of the Legion crushing the enemies under their feet (they're all supposed to be set to tunes of actual folksongs, exept one that's a Soviet artillerist's march with like 3 words changed). Hell, if I could animate, I'd totally do both Zaran il Legio and Forgotten Lore as an animation instead of a comic and feature copious amount of musical episodes.

Comics being a visual medium, there's never going to be a perfect marriage between image and music like film has. Even if you provice the lyrics and sound, the reader reads at his own pace— forcing that is an intrusion on the experience. As it is, I've always felt it was really jarring when someone starts "singing" in a comic, like the Archies in Archie Comics. You can't hear the music, and lyrics alone don't tell you about the rhythm, meter, tempo, style, etc. You can guess, but that's detracting from the reading experience again, and reading a story is generally supposed to feel seemless.

The best example of "music" in a comic I've ever seen was a Moon Knight comic called, I think, "Beat It."◊ It's a single-issue story about a man who was abused by his father and becomes an abuser himself. Interspersed throughout are non liner (as in, no panels, fairly abstract) images of marching bands, drummers, baseball players, and other things that "beat" things. The narrative boxes are basically a beat poem, and they're non-linear, too. The way the story is laid out is brilliant— the pages are structured so when you read them, you create your own beat, so you're "reading" a song. It's very frantic and primeaval— apparently the artists was a victim of abuse, and used the comic as an outlet for his feelings. It was effective to me because it didn't try to be a song— it simply has its own tempo, and everything was strcutred so the reader would follow it.

That's the problem I had when reading V For Vendetta, particularly with the Vicious Caberet.

Actually Ronka, I think that was kinda what I've been looking for. Using the frames and the speed of the action taking place in order to control the tempo and rythem.

I usually have characters use Forgot I Left The BGM On or lampshade the fact that there should have been dramatic music by now.

I prefer to let the readers supply the actual music themselves.

That said, some lyrics have a natural rhythm (like iambic pentameter), so exploiting that could be a solution.

I would just write the song lyrics in a narration box, surrounded by music notes. Then you could include author's notes saying what the song is.

One thing I forgot to mention that definetly will get in if I ever get around to drawing Forgotten Lore is the fact that the Herald has background music. This is actually taken directly from Nyarlathotep (whose expy he is), since one of his forms is accompanied by creatures playing flutes. The Herald is usually accompanied by his minions, some of which will be playing background music for him. He should atleast once comment on this, and break the fourt wall to lampshade the uselesness of background music in a comic.

I'm going to copypasta what I already said on Drunk Duck:

One comic that successfully pulled off music is Tailsteak's (creator of 1/0) "Band Comics." The series as a whole isn't great, but he has a way of showing music that I sort of like, for example: [1] ... It's like I'm reading loudness.

edited 29th Jan '11 11:51:46 PM by newtonthenewt