Drawn sound effects are one of the medium's genuinely distinctive tools and one of the most frequently mishandled. Treated as typography, dropped onto a finished panel in a display face, they sit on top of the drawing and announce that they were added afterwards. Treated as drawings, integrated into the space, they carry sound convincingly.

The distinction sounds precious and it is entirely practical: the same effect drawn in perspective, overlapping the objects near its source, reads completely differently from the same word placed flat over everything.

Placement indicates source

An effect should sit near whatever made the sound, and its position tells the reader where the sound came from. Effects placed for compositional convenience, in the empty corner of a panel, disconnect the sound from its cause and the reader has to reattach it.

Overlapping matters as much as position. An effect that passes behind a foreground object is inside the scene; one that sits in front of everything is on the surface of the page. Both are legitimate and they say different things, and the choice should be deliberate.

Weight indicates volume

Size, thickness and how much of the panel an effect occupies communicate loudness. That is a useful and slightly dangerous relationship, since a large effect also attracts attention, and an effect drawn large because it seemed important rather than because it was loud misdirects the reader.

Quiet sounds are the more interesting problem. A small, thin, low-contrast effect reads as barely audible, and in intimate scenes small effects frequently do more than large ones, because they imply proximity and attention rather than volume.

Integrating the effect into the drawing

Effects can follow the perspective of the scene, sit on a surface, wrap around a form, or be deformed by whatever they pass near. Any of these ties them into the space. The rendering treatment should also match the page: an effect with a soft airbrushed glow on an otherwise hard-edged page is immediately foreign.

This is the same consistency argument as the one about mixed pipelines in the piece on hybrid pipelines. A visual vocabulary works when everything is speaking it.

Restraint

A page with an effect on every panel reads as loud throughout, which means none of them register. Effects work by contrast, so a page with two of them is louder than a page with eight, in exactly the same way that a limited palette produces stronger colour.

Silence is available too. A panel with no effect where one might be expected reads as quiet, and that can be used deliberately, which is the same relational logic as the sound design argument in the piece on sound.

Effects and lettering together

Effects and balloons compete for the same space, and planning them together during layout prevents the common result where an effect has to be shrunk to fit around a balloon added later. Both belong in the layout stage, as argued in the piece on lettering.

They also need to differ visually, so a reader never confuses an effect with speech. Consistent treatment across a work establishes that distinction quickly and then it stops needing attention.

Effects and translation

Drawn effects are expensive to translate, since replacing them means redrawing rather than retyping. Some editions leave them and add a small gloss nearby, which is a reasonable compromise and preserves the original drawing.

Where multiple editions are planned, keeping effects on a separate layer makes the decision available later. It is the same layer discipline that lettering requires, and it costs nothing at the time.

One further consideration: effects carry style as strongly as any other element on the page. A rounded, soft, hand-drawn effect and a sharp angular one set completely different tones for the same sound, and a work that varies between the two without reason reads as unsettled. Deciding the effect vocabulary once, and recording it alongside the rest of the style constraints, keeps a long project coherent.

Drawing sound rather than typing it

Place effects at their source, overlap them into the scene, size them by volume rather than importance, match the page's rendering vocabulary, use few of them, plan them alongside balloons, and keep them on their own layer.

Characters here are fictional and unmistakably adult, as set out in the reader agreement.