If lightning strikes in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, that’s smart. Because you shouldn’t be in the forest during thunderstorms.

Certain conventional comic-book sound effects have always annoyed us. Surely no fistfall ever made the sound “pow,” but that one’s a classic, and isn’t going anywhere. Worse is “budda budda” for machine-gun fire. What the heck kind of onomatopoetic license is required for coming up with that?

No sound-effect texts get on our nerves, though, like those called upon to suggest thunder and lightning. We loved that creepy “Kraven’s Last Hunt” storyline from the Spidey titles of our youth, but seriously, on every page there was a mood-establishing panel showing lightning in the sky, and across it was written: KR-KA-KA-KOOOMMMM.

Come on. We’ve all been in thunderstorms before, and none of us has ever heard anything that sounded like “KR-KA-KA-KOOOMMMM.”

But it seems like thunder is a tricky sound to fake. Once, in elementary school, we got a backstage tour of a theatre where they showed us kids a big sheet of metal they’d flap in the wings to make the sound of thunder. We remember thinking “oh, that explains why, in the middle of the rainstorm in the play, we heard the noise of a big sheet of metal flapping.”

In the comic book we write one day, if we require a sound effect for thunder, we’ll hire some kid who’s studying for his bar mitzvah and have him transliterate “KR-KA-KA-KOOOMMMM” into Hebrew. It would be pronounced approximately the same—but look better, don’t you think?

Wear this shirt: to “Dark & Stormy Night” at your local rum bar.

Don’t wear this shirt: during the “lightning round” of Trivia Night at same (unless you intend to win).

This shirt tells the world: “The power I’m supplying, it’s electrifying.”

We call this color: Black And Stormy.

Back to top