Rockin' and a Reelin'

My wife got me a bass guitar for my (mumble-mumble) birthday. I try to play every day, even if it's just a couple of riffs. At the same time she got herself an acoustic guitar. We don't play together as much as we would like, as usually one of us is looking after the kids. But we both like to hear the other one play.

Then we got our 4-year old girl a drum kit. For some reason people keep telling us we are insane. We are lucky enough to have no near neighbours, so she won't be annoying anyone but us. To be honest, the sound of her banging away at the drums is better than any of the other noise-making toys she has, which are all tinny electronic sounding things that make dogs howl.

It's a full drum kit, but half-size. The assembly instructions were missing, but I found a website for putting a regular kit together, and they worked out fine. So far she's resisting learning anything constructive, but has a repertoire of numbered 'songs' that she plays for anyone who cannot escape. She gave a concert for the man who cleaned our fireplace chimney the other day. Luckily he had kids of his own and was very understanding.

Recently I have been thinking about music, and other sounds, in comics. I once sat down and looked at some of the things I had written and realized they had very few sounds in them. My writing was mute, aside from speech. I have a long-term plan to correct that. I'm not going to do anything as ambitious as P. Craig Russell's Opera comics, just add some sound into my writing ... from a bouncing noise as something rubbery hits the floor, maybe a song on the radio, to a cataclysmic explosion.

So every time I pick up my bass to play a little Green Onions, Shaft, My Sharona or Fever I think about comics. Every time my wife plays guitar or my child plays drums I think of comics. I love it when distraction activities can be rationalized into part of work.