Hoai-Tran Bui:
Marvel is making strides to branch out into the audio world lately, releasing last year a 10-episode podcast series called Wolverine: The Long Night, which won the Best Scripted Podcast prize at the first annual iHeartRadio Podcast Awards. The second season, Wolverine: The Lost Trail, was released earlier this spring. Both podcasts were more akin to audio dramas than podcasts, with actors enacting the scenes with props and foley sounds. However, these upcoming audiobooks will likely be more traditional than the Wolverine projects, though it’s unclear how Marvel and Dreamscape will adapt the visual medium like comic books into an auditory experience.
If these are no more than just traditional audiobooks, reading the written word outloud, then Marvel is completely missing the boat here. Comics are a visual artform and if you take away the images, you need to do a lot more than just echo the words on the page to the listener.
I enjoyed the first Marvel fictional podcast, Wolverine: A Long Night1 and as soon as the second season is released outside of the paywall I’ll give it a listen as well. With that being said, I can understand them not wanting to devote as many resources to this project, but I hope they have some unique ideas.
I honestly have no idea the right way to translate comics into an audio form. But it needs to be more. I recently listened to Evil Eye, an audible original, and thought it was a great way to tell a short story in an audio format. It’s about an hour and a half long and it takes place over about fifty phone calls. You hear the phone ring, occasionally you hear the answering machine, and everything is accompanied by foley work.
The type of production that went into Evil Eye should be the bare minimum for an audio comic book.
not enough to pay for it though.↩︎