How our Sense of Smell and Sound are Portrayed in the Walking Dead Series

*WARNING: Some of the following images may be disturbing to some readers*

As a fairly new reader of comics, I tend focus on the text more than the visual elements because I am used to novels that are strictly word-based. My Comics Theory class with Professor Dale Jacobs has taught me that the images are just as much a part of the story as the text is.

 

When we read comics, we really only use our visual sense to experience the story, so how can creators of comics bring the rest of our senses to life? They use sensory diegetic images which “…depict the characters, objects, and sensory environment of the world of the story” (Duncan and Smith 155).

I am a big fan of The Walking Dead TV series so I took this opportunity to use examples from the second and third The Walking Dead graphic novels to explain sensory diegetic images. The Walking Dead is about a group of people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. Rick Grimes is the central character in the series and is accompanied by other characters including his son, Carl, and his wife, Lori. For this post, I will be focusing on how sound and smell are depicted in this novel.

Sounds can be conveyed through the shape of the word balloon and the way words are lettered (e.g., bold, capitalized, italicized, etc.). The word balloon in the second panel in the tier to the right is distinctly different from the balloons in the other two panels because it is has a line surrounding it. This word balloon is used when the dialogue is an exclamation with strong emotion; this is consistent throughout the book.  

If you compare the previous example with the word balloons in this next tier, you know that the meaning is different even though they are both exclaiming something. These word balloons are expressing that Allen, the man in the two panels, is yelling because they are jagged. The font is expressing the same thing; we know this because the words are capitalized and bolded.

Creators can also use onomatopoeias as sound effects. Onomatopoeias are "...invented words that mimic sounds..." (Duncan  and Smith 156). In the panel to the right, the creators used the word "whack" as the sound an axe makes when chopping a walker's head off. The way the word is drawn is also a description of the sound and represents what is coming out of the walker (a.k.a., a zombie).

"A smell can be abstractly represented by graphic conventions" (Duncan and Smith 157), such as flies buzzing around something or someone with bad odor. The following panel has many flies buzzing around Glenn (right in the first panel) and Rick (left in the second panel), indicating that they smell bad. This is validated by the conversation they had about rubbing walker blood on them so they can blend in with the herd of walkers in the city.

No matter how inventive a creator is, it's all up to how the reader is influenced by the text and images of a comic book.

-Kylie Jamieson 

Works Cited

Duncan, Randy and Matthew J. Smith. “Experiencing the Story.” The Power of 

     Comics: History, Form, and Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009. 155-57.