From the day I learned of its existence, sometime during grade school, onomatopoeia was both one of my favourite words and described my favourite category of words. (I had a penchant for very large words from a young age—another favourite was antidisestablishmentarianism, which I discovered in grade 2 during a contest I instigated with another brainy nerd to find the longest words we could. This was pre-internet, of course, though not pre-television, recess or toys.)
Onomatopoeia from the cover of Green Arrow #13. Art by Mark Wagner
Words that sound like the things they name: crash, sizzle, slash, flutter, fizzle, whoosh, whizz, burp, bleep, jiggle, croak, tick tock, vroom vroom vroom! Onomatopoeias are always delightful and mostly fun to say. The supreme power of the onomatopoeia was harnessed early by comic book creators with their pages full of Bam! Boom! Wham! Bif! Zing! Kersplash! Splat! Notoriously short on words, for the comic-book artist, all it takes is one well-drawn and colourful Kapow! to describe a thousand punches. Perhaps to mark their indebtedness to the word, in 2002 DC Comics introduced a villain called Onomatopoeia, a serial killer who speaks only in sounds. (Is his comeback “oh, snap!”? It probably should be.) While the question of whether or not Onomatopoeia is a metahuman remains open, he’s certainly a metaquestion for the genre: if one controls the BLAM!, does one control the comic? » Read the rest of this entry «
