Rumble, Race, and Crash: Space and Movement through Sound Effects in Akira and American Flagg!

When the visual and phonetic characteristics of sound effects are discussed in comics scholarship, it is primarily in terms of their impact on audiation—the act of hearing sounds in our heads.¹ However, as Will Eisner has observed, in comics "text reads as an image," and so we must also consider the visual presence of sound effects on the page.² Sean Guynes goes further, arguing that sound effects play an integral role in comics through linking and helping readers evaluate information on and even off the page—what Thierry Groensteen terms "braiding."³ In order to understand the role of sound effects we therefore need to consider not only their (often onomatopoetic) phonetic qualities, but also their visual presence and relationship to other elements in the panel, on the page, throughout the comic, and even in media and society more broadly.

This article considers how sound effects construct the worlds of comics and define our relationship to those worlds through analyzing the experimental use of sound effects in two influential comics: Ōtomo Katsuhiro's Akira and Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! Sound effects in these works create a sense of depth, flatness, movement through time, moments in time, boundaries, and unboundedness—contorting the point(s) of view presented by the art alone. As sound effects in these works weave through the art, they take our point of hearing with them. In doing so, sound effects complicate not only our perception of space and time in comics' fictional worlds but also the stability of our relationship to those worlds.

Through their integration into the visual plane, sound effects in Akira and American Flagg! signify a wide array of aural, visual, temporal, spatial, narrative, and extratextual information. They express this information not only through the sound effects' typographical presentation, but also through how the text is drawn in relation to the art, through the letters' phonetic values, and through our assumptions as readers—especially our assumptions that sound effects are invisible in the comic's world and that repetitive sounds persist between panels. Sound effects provide us with separate points of hearing and slice temporally through the comic art in ways that create and flatten depth. Sound effects' multiple simultaneous modes of signification enable them to destabilize our "positionality," used here to refer to "a quality of positioning," after Thomas Lamarre.⁴

I take as my point of focus the first compilation volume of Akira and the first three issues of American Flagg! Serialized contemporaneously but on opposite sides of the globe, these comics blend radical visuals with stories of postapocalyptic futures in which the world as we know it has crumbled to reveal a crueler, harsher humanity. Inspired by experimental European comics and the international boom in science fiction across media in the 1970s and early 1980s, the creators of Akira and American Flagg! explored the underutilized potential of the comics medium.⁵

Akira (1982–90) was created by Ōtomo Katsuhiro and an uncredited team of assistants and was first serialized in Japan. In 1988, Akira was picked up by Marvel, which released the originally black-and-white manga in American comic singles format, for which Akira was flipped, translated, and colorized—the first and only manga to receive this treatment. As the first manga to gain widespread popularity in America, Akira was many American consumers' introduction to manga.⁶ Akira clearly stood apart from its contemporaries through its pacing, precise draftsmanship, complex postapocalyptic plot, and character development. Akira's use of sound effects was also clearly distinct from its Japanese manga contemporaries. However, as Martin de la Iglesia argues and I expand upon, the impact of Akira's sound effects was significantly altered in its English translation.⁷ With the release of its blockbuster film adaptation in Japan in 1988, and in the United States and Europe the following year, its influence exploded, shaking up the American and Japanese comic industries. Akira remains one of the best-known manga and anime titles today.

American Flagg! (original run 1983–89) was created by Howard Chaykin and serialized in...