Chloe Bennet as Skye. Photo: ABC/Ron Tom
The fourth episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t dive into the Marvel comics canon overtly — which is probably a good thing as far as the show is concerned. It’ll need to carve out its own universe and identity if it’s going to be a success. But the comic-booky vibe was still there, lurking, Gollum-like. You just have to know where to look. “Give me examples,” you say? Well, all right, then.
Skye saying “bang” when she pulls the trigger
Onomatopoeia comes banging and clanging into the show. This line isn’t a direct reference to any Marvel book I can think of, but it does cut to the heart of the comic book experience. One of the things non-comics readers often think of when — if — they think of comics at all is the use of words, written in bombastic type, as sound effects.
Maybe it’ll be obvious to you once I say it, but comic books don’t have sound; they have visual conventions designed to convey sound, just as a whole other set of visual conventions convey movement. In the latter case, lines emanating in the direction from which motion originates signify that motion. The more aggressive the line—heavier rule, longer length—the faster or more aggressive the movement.
Sound is different. Words spoken by a character get printed inside an oval, usually white, with a little point aimed at the person speaking. (By convention, thoughts appear in a little cloud, connected to the thinker by circles of decreasing size.) Sounds made by other stuff — objects, explosions, cars peeling out, rockets taking off, etc. –appear as onomatopoetic words or phrases near the action in the frame.
You know the obvious ones, especially if you watched the old Adam West Batman show from the 1960s: bam, pow, crash, and so on. In fact, those are familiar enough that when mainstream publications run articles about comic books, they tend to put them in the headlines as signifiers. As in, “Bang! Pow! Comic Books Grow Up!” I think I actually reported one of those in the 1990s. Sorry.
I bring this up because novice comic book readers often express trouble figuring out how to process all this visual information. What do they read first? The dialog? The narration squares? The sound effects? Or do they look at the pictures? The troubling answer is that unlike any other medium, all those things happen in parallel on only one sensory channel. The writer and artist Scott McCloud thinks way more deeply about all this in his books on comics; they’re worth a read.
Anyway, more creative writers use more creative sound effects. I enjoy stuff like “Kra-ka-foom!” (That’s a monster hitting a volcano.) Or “Vassszhh!” (That’s an alien ray gun.) Or one of my favorites, a classic: “phut!” (A silenced pistol firing.)
In comics, sound effects fell out of favor for a while — avant-garde writers and artists abandoned them in droves by the 1980s. Watchmen forgoes them completely, and The Dark Knight Returns uses them sparingly (the sound of a kryptonite bomb-tipped arrow being fired by the archer Green Arrow: “ktanngggg”). More recently, some comics have tried to deploy them more creatively; Grant Morrison’s recent run on Batman built them into the scene, as smoke from an explosion, let’s say. And a badguy created by Kevin Smith actually spoke the sounds as the effects appeared.
So maybe I’m reading too deep — heaven forefend — but I like the idea that Skye says “bang” when she pulls the trigger of a gun because deep down she knows she’s living a comic book life.
No telepathy
When Melinda May says that no credible evidence exists for telepathy or precognition, she’s shutting a door. That little riff is notable not for what it refers to in comics but what it pointedly does not: the X-Men. From Professor X and Phoenix on down, the mutant community of Marvel Comics is heavily populated with people whose brains do nifty stuff. You have your telepaths, of course. Before Jean Grey assumes the cosmic power of the Phoenix (and eventually destroys a solar system) she goes by Marvel Girl, a telepath who also has the power of telekinesis, moving stuff with your mind.
(I always thought it’d be cool if telekinesis took just as much energy as if you had to get up and move a thing with your body. Like, if you were too lazy to get up and find the remote control with your body, you’d be too lazy to do it with your mind, too.)
The X-Men and most if not all of the Marvel mutants are off limits for S.H.I.E.L.D., since they’re owned not by Marvel Studios or its parent company, Disney, but by Fox. Fans (and the head of Marvel’s film division) often pine for a future when all the contracts will resolve with every Marvel character under one cinematic roof. May’s remark doesn’t preclude that, but since Fox’s X-Men have been reading minds since the 1960s in movie time, bringing them in line with the Avengers-verse would seem to require a reboot and modernization, or a retcon. (That’s a retroactive continuity change, when you change backstory.)
Alien text
Longtime Marvel obsessives, the kind of people who write articles about comic book references in TV shows and bought and studied the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, will remember the back pages of those comics that listed alien races. Number of appendages, average skin color and height, names of representatives. I remember being shocked to learn that the official representatives of humanity were Reed Richards and Ben Grim, Mr. Fantastic and the Thing of the Fantastic Four. Maybe I was hoping the job would be mine.
The Marvel Universe is full of aliens, of course. In Avengers, the aliens with which Loki allied himself, the Chitauri, were a version of longtime bad guys the Skrulls, shapeshifters locked in an eternal war with another race, the Kree. So let’s cross the Chitauri off the list of who the TV show’s aliens might be — S.H.I.E.L.D. would have recognized that text, right? Could be the Kree, or some version of them. But if I got to express a preference, I’d put in a request for the Dire Wraiths, another bunch of shapeshifters with barbed, brain-sucking tongues. Why? Because their main antagonist, the hero who fought them, was a cybernetic spaceknight named Rom, based on a poor-selling toy that was actually pretty charming.
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