BGM in Comics?

[mammothtank]

What say you, NPF masses? Would appropriate background music for a webcomic be a good idea? Please explain your responses.

[Nikose Tyris]

people who read webcomics either have really slow computers, or are playing there own music in the background. sometimes both. haveing background music would just screw with things too much.

plus, imagine waiting a half hour to load a comic, just to hear a midi "jingle bells" in the background. imagine the destruction.

[Arlia Janet]

I don't think it would work for 8-bit. From Brian's standpoint, it's a waste of a lot of money (aka bandwidth) to add background music to something that should stand alone.

If you are talking about webcomics in general, there are certain epic moments when a background music is inspiring. It would be hard to pull off for every episode, but it could be really cool.


... in hindsight, I should have voted the other way.

[mammothtank]

I wasn't thinking about 8BT... I've been planning on making a comic with sprite characters I cooked up in MS Paint, and I was thinking of trying to add music. Specifically, various game soundtracks from vgmusic.com that would fit the mood of the scene, not something random like Jingle Bells. If that changes people's answers, then that works for me.

[VA_Ninja]

I wouldn't mind it, but don't make a habit of it.

[Krylo]

I'd say it's a bad idea for a few reasons.

Firstly, in tv/movies/video games/other mediums which already have sound imposed, you can control at what point of the story the song reaches its climax, where the feeling in the music is strongest compared to that on stage or screen. This is key in making any kind of meaningful or artistic use of music in a work of comedy or drama. Without this the music is just THERE, it isn't connected to the story, but is rather just noise in the background.

With a web comic you can not achieve this because people will, naturally, read each panel at different speeds, look away from the comic and come back to where they left off (instead of to where the music should have carried them) etc. etc. The only way you could make this work in a webcomic is to use flash and make every panel appear at the right moment in the music so they'd be FORCED to read it at the rate you want them to, and this would just annoy people who read slower or faster than you'd like (not to mention that, at this point you might as well just make an honest to god animation).

Secondly is the point of sound quality: Most browser programs aren't going to play an mp3 for you, they're just going to play a .wav or a .midi, both of which sound like crap. The music is bastardized as well as not fitting with the story, and this leaves things even worse off. You can SORT OF get around this with some java programming and developing a 'jukebox' (ala www.boyhitscar.com), but that just seems a silly waste of time.

Lastly we have the bandwidth issue: Your comic had better fucking rock if you're adding all this music to it, because it's going to take it about ten to twenty times longer to load with all these sound files. If your comic isn't the best thing since sliced bread with a little bit of butter on it, topped with cheese, and then microw... well you get the picture... the point is, people aren't going to want to wait that extra time to read it just because it has music.

So, basically, I don't see how it could possibly work out well.

[C-dog]

.wav isn't crap, it's just really friggin huge. CDs are in .wav format.

Back to the topic:

Music would be a bad idea. Like Krylo said, people read the comic at different speeds or may re-read some parts. I re-read some pannels several times before going on if they're really funny. Any background music would have to somehow encompass the entire comic, which means either the comic is too bland to need changing music or the music, in trying to match the whole comic, doesn't match any one pannel at all.

Besides, I don't know about anyone else, but I *hate* background music on websites in the first place. If I click on a site with BGM I leave as quickly as I came. Can't stand it.

[mammothtank]

I think I understand where you guys are going with this: It won't really work the way I thought it would, and will make it harder to load the page in the first place, so it's really just more trouble than it's worth.

However, I am still planning on making that comic I mentioned. I just need to fine-tune a few things...

[Jusus Crist]

If you want music in the background then just play your own music. God how lazy can u be

[Mike McC]

ClanBOB tried doing that with certain Life of Riley strips, having an mp3 play in the background. They had to stop, because it ate up Eighty Bajillion Gigabytes of Bandwidth.