A great comic art exhibit just opened last weekend at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, CA (continuing until Nov. 11, 2007) of original art by Basil Wolverton. Wolverton was a master of comics with sound effects. There is an article on the ASIFA website that Wolverton wrote in 1948 for the Daily Oregonian that you must read! It's called appropriately, "ACOUSTICS in the COMICS". It tells the tale of how he came up with "realistic" sound effects for his comics after his publisher saw him using the word "cranch" in one of his cartoons:' "I want realism!" he (my publisher) had bellowed. "No more of this wild imaginative stuff that's causing some people to want to ban our comic books! From now on, get that realism in there, and your strips will be horribly funny! Then the readers will go into hysterics and laugh like crazy, and our books will be acclaimed the most laugh provoking on the stands!" That meant that an imaginative word like CRANCH was taboo. It was up to me to get the real sound word.'-ASIFA LINK to PART ONE
And be sure to read PART TWO which tells us that his publisher actually insisted that he act out the situations to produce zillions of his crazy new "sound-words".
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