BEEOW! BWEE! and BEEANG! ... Bullet sounds in Johnny Cloud Adventures

Let's go off on a tangent here ... and see how many sounds can a bullet make when it hits Johnny Cloud's P-51.

The first two B-sounds in the title of this post are the most common. I guess most 20-30mm guns make B-sounds. I guess you never knew that. Neither did I.

After tabulating every incoming bullet sound in the original Johnny Cloud adventures from AAMOW#82 to AAMOW#117, I have to admit that I wore headphones to protect myself, and occasionally had to duck lead coming off the pages!

Johnny Cloud was quite colorful with his descriptions of the lead pounding him. He called them "raging steel mosquitoes" in AAMOW#83, and "angry steel hornets" in AAMOW#93 -- so what are they: Mosquitoes or Hornets? In AAMOW#102 he likened the barrage of bullets as "enemy lead licking at my cockpit." And, he calls them "blazing firecrackers" in AAMOW#105. Oh, and here comes another pesky insect, as he put it in AAMOW#106: "...snarling fireflies seemed to swarm into my own cockpit."

Quite the poet he is.

So back to the incoming bullet sounds (not to be confused with explosions or the beat of his own machine guns -- we will explore those on a future tangent) ... all told, I tabulated 19 different sounds.

BEEANG! BEEOW! BWEE! BWEEE! BWEEOW! PING! RRRIIP! SPANG! SPLANG! SPLANGG! TZING! TZINNG! VIP! VIIIP! ZING! ZIING! ZUNG! ZUNNG! ZZING! 

Now try and say them all in one or two breaths.

My favorite is SPLANG! But I have to say that TZINNG! is a close second. Now let me ask: How to you sound-out the double Ns in that last one? 

What fun it must have been for the Letterer to create these sounds. And did Robert Kanigher help?

Image Credit:

AAMOW#96 (April 1963): Story Art: I. Novick; Writer: R. Kanigher.

Johnny Cloud TM DC Comics