Dialects and Diversity in Comic Books
The Avengers, Brother Voodoo, and the Imperfect Art of Sound
Jun 24, 2009
The way a character speaks is an important part of who they are. It’s instant exposition. The second a character opens their mouth, a viewer can form a quick connection, subconsciously drawing from personal experience, cultural knowledge, and small snippets of their everyday life to craft a workable relationship with a fictional human.
This makes properly using a dialect difficult, because there is something very telling in every syllable. When used improperly dialect can doom an otherwise well-drawn character.
Dialect in Comics
A comic writer’s use of dialects can be more problematic than other professionals in similar genres, for one very specific reason:
The spoken word is different than the written one… and the comic word is far more different than that.
Each word in a comic is a piece of the art. It isn’t simply a word – it’s a visual representation of an idea. When writing a screenplay, an actor can define his or her own way of communicating auditory detail. When reading a novel, every word is translated through the reader’s own voice – they can work around any mental road block they would normally place in between themselves and someone or something that communicates differently.
In comics, this simply isn’t true. There’s not a whole lot of wiggle room between the author, the character, and the reader when it comes to the graphic word. The word is a picture – it is not spoken, it is not heard. It’s as didactic as a diagram in an instruction book, and must be treated with similar focus and care.
Brother Voodoo and the Hazards of Dialect
In “New Avengers: Search for the Sorcerer Supreme,” writer Brian Michael Bendis chose to give guest star Brother Voodoo a firm, obvious dialect. Since Voodoo is by no means an iconic or famous character, his appearances vary more wildly than other shared universe heroes. There is no single writer inexorably linked with him, no defining series run or moment in his history… which means he doesn’t have anything in the way of concrete character development. He rises and falls by the hand of the writer choosing to utilize him.
For his part, Bendis realized that Brother Voodoo is not only from Haiti, he is also a “houngan asogwe”, or high Voodoo priest. It’s important to his character – hell, it’s part of his name – and it makes him unique. It also happens to be the sole reason Bendis has plucked him from obscurity for a starring role in aforementioned arc.
To Bendis, if Brother Voodoo is Haitian, he should speak like one. Or, at least, what Bendis approximates a Haitian would talk like. He’s been met with cries of racial insensitivity for grafting on a pidgin English dialect, something Voodoo hasn’t had in previous appearances.
Odds are, Bendis simply meant to show a more diverse character. His track record of minority characters like Luke Cage certainly speaks to an appreciation of the value in different cultures and belief systems. And Voodoo, is after all, Haitian, meaning it could be insensitive to show him speaking like any other English-speaking character. On the other hand, most Haitian-born English speakers probably don’t say things like “Brudder”… unless written by someone who’s only contact with the culture has been through films and television.
It was a good idea to make Brother Voodoo unique by playing up his dialect, because he immediately stands out as from another cultural milieu simply by making his graphic words appear different than the other speakers. It was just poor practice, poorly researched, and probably just a little bit cynical.
Better Dialect Practices
There is only really one way to nail a character’s dialect, and that is to speak to someone who also has it. It’s not as hard as it seems, either. People love to talk about themselves, their culture, their unique experiences, especially if they believe it has the chance to be immortalized in some sort of art. It's as simple as picking up the phone and letting someone know there's something unique and interesting about them.
This is a bit more complicated for comics, because of the necessity of crafting a dialect visually. The word on the page must visually trigger the correct sound in a person’s head, a difficult enterprise to be sure. Yet, it is another easy fix. No matter how much a writer loves a specific dialect, if they can’t make it work on the comic page, then they shouldn’t use it.
A character’s culture can be relayed in a number of different ways, whether explicitly visual or through some well-written exposition. There are other ways to get across the fact that Brother Voodoo is from Haiti – if that’s even an important detail. If he must simply be unique, then dialogue and word choice are really the way to go. Choose what he’s saying more carefully, and all the necessary details can be filled in by the reader. Readers are smart, and they’ll do the work for the writer in terms of speaking voice as long as the character is rounded with enough details to get the important information across.
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