Forgive me, faithful readers, for replacing my latest slab of critique of the comic book industry with a slice of life from my own experiences. Like any writer worth their salt and ink, I must make the most meandering moments into something worth reading. What better challenge than my own life?

I’m not sure what came first: Doctor Doom, or Doom Metal. Well, I guess Doctor Doom came first, since Fantastic Four #5 has a few years on Black Sabbath’s first album, but that’s beside the point. For me, I’m going to go ahead and say that Doom Metal did come first. I may have already had been reading Hellboy and Alan Moore books by the time I started listening to High On Fire, but I was not really into superheroes at the time. After playing the tar out of HoF’s Blessed Black Wings, I began digging deeper into the smokey and gloomy depths of Doom Metal bands like Candlemass, Electric Wizard, Trouble, Cathedral, etc. while noticing more and more that this armored dude in a green tunic and cloak was pretty cool. Finally, I broke down and bought a miniseries titled Books of Doom, in which Ed Brubaker tells the origin of Victor Von Doom in all its triumphs and tragedies. It only snowballed from there.

“Cool story, Brett, but is there a point to this, besides you reminiscing about your own dorkiness?”

Not really, but I’ll make one up right now:

There seems to be an unspoken connection between music and comics. Weird concept? Not when you start begin to think things through. Consider the fact that comics, particularly ones that have been published in the past decade’s worth of time, have a distinctly cinematic feel to them. (So much so, that a handful of films based on comic books have been made in the past three decades.) While a movie leaves little to the imagination, however, since it has already filled out the visual and audio requirements of an adaptation, a comic remains mute throughout its pages. It is then up to the reader to compose the score themselves – along with voices and whatever “KRAKABATHOOOM” might actually sound like. Moreover, a character’s personal theme or soundtrack is still left to interpretation; I would imagine The Question would be a big fan of Tom Waits, but someone else could easily argue that Vic Sage might have a thing for pop songs.

The best kind of music is that which almost seems animated, almost leaping out of the ether in some sort of spatial means, and the same is true for comic art. Does an Amon Amarth song about Ragnarok really apply to everyday life? No. However, it does wonders for reading some Thor. And while I imagine the monarch of Latveria might not dig Grand Magus or Saint Vitus as much as I do, I know he would still enjoy something as majestic and bombastic, possibly in the vein of Mussorgsky or Dvorak. Still, it’s up to the reader’s own ears and tastes to determine what will silently play while reading their latest book.

That brings me to another point I will make up as I go along: the practicality of all this sound design. Trying to tack on a song or artist with a story or character is quite a feat, especially when you are lacking in resources or knowledge of music and comics. You can try to force the latest issue of Hulk and the latest hit from Miley Cyrus intertwine with each other – honestly, I would probably not mind an attempt at that – but if you really want to find the right combination of images, words, and music, you are probably going to have to step up your musical and comical(?) repertoire. Now, I know all of us here spend hard-earned money for our comics, and even more so for all those CDs and vinyl, but I would encourage you all to expand explore new books and music. Your local library has plenty of Romantic-era pieces for those steampunk books that take place at the turn of the century or whereabouts, and all that Jazz will work nicely for just about any hardboiled noir/crime comic.

On the surface, it may seem like sound simply has no place in comics, but that is as true as saying there’s only one particular sound for any genre of music. When you’re traveling through the Speed Force, or at the speed of sound, be as creative as you can be curious.