On immediate encounter, the page evinces no changes to the repeated text beyond minor variations in their cursive lettering in letter form and the letter’s weight. For instance, the spread above is comprised mostly of the words ‘Not As’ repeated across two pages with the words ‘Never as bright’ in the center bleeding right into the spine. Unlike the onomatopoetics like the ‘Pow!’ and ‘Sok!’ in a Batman comic, Yours’ words take on their sonic significance not by attempting to represent a sound, but through how Ferrick arranges text across pages. In these juxtapositions, Ferrick’s work presents synesthetic visuals that replicate the sound work of non-speech vocalizing. I take up Miodrag’s fragmented spatial arrangement to show how Yours generates sound by way of constant juxtaposition and variation between letters’ forms and their arrangement. Hannah Miodrag’s “Fragmented Text: The Spatial Arrangement of Words in Comics” (from the Fall 2010 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art) critiques this limiting view, offering that meaning can be found in areas outside of the juxtaposition of text/image or in closure provided by a comic’s gutter if comics are instead viewed as fragmentary spatial arrangements where text and image co-create meaning (Miodrag 309).
From this perspective, readers locate a comic’s sound in the semiotic meaning of text (narration, dialogue, onomatopoeia), or in the illustrative representation of a sonic event, such as a fist connecting with a person’s face, typically paired with an onomatopoeia according to some genre conventions, such as in the comic panel below. Yours clarifies a limitation of Scott McCloud’s understanding of the relationships available between text and image in comics, which imagines either element as separate and stable categories juxtaposed toward the creation of a particular effect. I’m interested here in speculating on the way Ferrick’s experiment with text creates a sonic experience I had not formerly encountered in comics. An excerpt from ‘Yours’ illustrating the use of repetition in the comic.