Brown Note / Comic Books

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• 2000 AD:
  • Judge Fear (one of a group of undead Evil Counterparts) in Judge Dredd has the ability to kill anyone who looks at his face through sheer terror, typically by lifting his helmet while delivering his catchphrase. The title character is sufficiently badass to shrug it off and cave his face in with his bare hands.
    Judge Fear: Gaaaaaze into the face of Fear!
    Dredd: Gaze into the fist of Dredd!
  • One of Tharg's Future Shocks from written by Alan Moore gives a spin on the alien parasite, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type tale by suggesting that an alien life form could even be as abstract as an idea. One such "idea" takes over the mind of a person once he/she is told the "idea" by someone already possessed by it.
• Asterix has Cacofonix the Bard, a Dreadful Musician whose singing is so feared, a running gag is for him to be bound and gagged while the rest are having a party. His singing is so bad that it can send legionnaires and even Horny Vikings into mental breakdown, send wild beasts and even a dragon running away in fear. It might even anger the gods themselves, given that he has his treehouse zapped by a bolt of lightning and causes rain to fall just from his singing... even when he sings indoors.
• In Astro City, the roar of the Living Nightmare inflicts pain on whoever hears it.
• In one issue of The Authority, there's an idea so disturbing that anyone who hears it has to tell someone else, and then kill themselves. It's stopped by having the last victim tell it to a film producer, then be restrained. The producer declares it "too downbeat" and promptly rewrites it to be more cheerful.
• In Beetle Bailey, swearing forcefully (usually but not always when done by Sergeant Snorkel) can have effects such as stunning people or killing flowers. Not to be confused with the times when Sarge shouts so loudly the sheer volume or wind of it has a physical effect.
• In Bone, Fone Bone's reading voice causes mild drowsiness for human listeners, and debilitating pain for rat creatures. This is probably mostly because he always reads Moby-Dick.
• In Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire: The Gallimaufry, there is a game called "Martian Charades", in which a human performs a series of ritualized gestures at an audience of aliens. The gestures have all been clinically proven to be hysterically funny to almost every race in the cosmos except humans themselves. The alien who can keep a straight face the longest is the winner. Moreover, the sight of an audience of multivariate aliens falling all over itself in laughter tends to make the performing human sick. Making the human sick is considered an important secondary goal of the game. (All of this was suggested in a fan letter after Phil Foglio mentioned "Martian Charades" in an issue of Buck Godot, and Foglio embraced it as canon.)
• Casper the Friendly Ghost:
  • An old comic had a story about a scarecrow so un-scary that the Ghostly Trio gave it the scariest face in existence: a photo of the Ogre of the Black Pool. It was so scary it even scared ghosts! In fact, the only thing it couldn't scare was a sweet little old lady who painted over the scarecrow's face with a friendly one when it came to life and went berserk. (Those old Harvey comics could get weird.)
  • Speaking of Harvey, ghost boos. They frighten practically everything, even gods and demons! (To be fair, though, demons in the Harvey-verse aren't exactly terrifying.) Even a ghost thinking the word "boo" could scare people, provided that ghost could communicate telepathically. Subverted when Fatso claimed to be scary enough to cause the sun to go out. He took his skeptical brothers out on a sunny day and very quietly whispered "Boo" — and the sun turned black! The two other brothers panicked ("He's scared the sun dark!") until Fatso assured them that the sun would be bright again when it no longer felt frightened. He then went back into the house and admitted to the reader that he had known the exact moment when a solar eclipse would occur.
• Amelia Mintz from Chew is a saboscrivner, meaning that she can write or talk about food so vividly that it can cause people to actually taste it. She usually uses it to do her job (she's a food critic). However, when terrorists try to take over the building, she proceeds to describe a particularly nasty meal, sending them to the hospital. Later, it was revealed that her power isn't completely developed, and at its full potential, it could induce fatal food poisoning. She eventually uses it to write a manuscript which would kill anyone, who recently ate chicken.
• In Warren Ellis' City of Silence, a hacker overrides every TV channel so demons can "relate all the secrets of hell on live TV". Hearing these secrets drives viewers insane... except for the protagonists, who "knew it all already" on account of being natives of Hell.
• In Cossacks, the old Ukrainian Cossack warrior Sachko uses a whistle that humans can't hear, but horse can, and it's so painful to their ears that they can run out of control and dismount the rider.
• The DCU:
  • In the Batman one-shot Battle for the Cowl: Arkham Asylum, the Hamburger Lady believes that her face is so deformed that anyone not already insane can't look upon it. Dr Arkham tries to prove her wrong by looking at her face and is later implied to have gone insane because of it... until it's later revealed that she's a figment of his imagination.
  • Countdown to Final Crisis: The Pied Piper, usually a mostly harmless reformed villain, turns out to be able to cause a Brown Note effect with his flute. Not only does he kill Desaad with it, but he also takes out Apokolips using the music of Queen. The Pied Piper can do this because he's one of the rare humans who possess the entire Anti-Life Equation inside his mind.
  • In Final Crisis, Superman destroys Darkseid by creating a sound which disrupts his energy form.
  • A Hellblazer story seems to be about this when people celebrating a revived pagan festival become many interesting shades of crazy while some scientists conduct mysterious tests at a nearby facility. It turns out that the festival itself is the cause, since the scientists' equipment is not only unplugged but never worked to begin with.
  • Justice Society of America: Johnny Sorrow's face instantly kills anyone who sees it.
  • Lucifer: A primordial Jin En Mok creature in human guise punishes a janitor, who disturbed his train of thought, by giving him a gold coin bearing "the sigil Calx". As the janitor stares transfixed at the sigil, the Jin En Mok tells him that he will look at it more often each day, with a corresponding increase in pain and pleasure, until he dies within a year.
  • New Gods: The Anti-Life Equation as introduced by Jack Kirby was initially a mysterious "thing" which would somehow allow Darkseid to dominate all of life. Grant Morrison, in their Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005) and Final Crisis, explicitly revealed that it is a fundamental mathematical proof that life is not worth living, thus allowing the wielder to destroy the wills of any being by simply exposing them to it.^note There also exists the Life Equation, which is the fundamental proof that life is worth living. The heroes use the Life Equation to counter the Anti-Life near the end of Final Crisis.
  • Robin (1993): Looking the Curator in the eye turns the viewer to stone, which the Curator then treats as part of an exhibit along with his other victims.
  • The Sandman (1989): In issue #45, Ishtar is a goddess in human form working as an exotic dancer, and apparently, she's been holding back the full extent of her dancing talents. After a visit from Dream and Delirium, she stops holding back. Her last dance kills the audience and burns the strip club to the ground.
  • Secret Six: Jeannette is a centuries old banshee who can make people relive her botched execution with her song. Wonder Woman, of all people, experienced it firsthand, and the fact that it didn't cause any permanent damage is itself a miracle.
  • Shadowpact: The Mind Virus is a magical infection which was created by an evil wizard who wanted to instill unquestioning obedience to himself and only himself in his slaves. It is a living idea that spreads simply by being communicated to its victims and takes root by allowing its victim to feel only pleasure and no pain. Even the wizard himself ended up succumbing to it. The only people who were immune to it were children and an old wizard who had to damage his own ears in order to protect himself from it.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): To look straight at Medusa is to die via being Taken for Granite.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In "Zio Paperone e lo slogan invincibile", John D. Rockerduck hears of an ancient "slogan", a Scottish phrase which supposedly leaves a lasting impression upon anyone who hears it. He proceeds to acquire it and proceeds to incorporate it in a grand advertising campaign for all his products. Too late, he finds out that it's a "slogan" in the old sense... namely, a Scottish clan's Battle Cry. It leaves an "impression" upon its listeners all right — anyone who hears it instantly goes into blind panic. Not only Rockerduck is forced to pay a ridiculously large fine, but all his potential customers also get conditioned into instinctively fearing his products.
• Enigma features "The Interior League", a supervillain team who sneaks into peoples homes and... rearranges their furniture. In such a way that when viewing it, the owner goes stark raving mad and murders their whole family.
• Gaston Lagaffe once tuned a violin so badly that playing it paralyzed the audience. His Gaffophone can also have a number of strange effects when certain notes are played, including unscrewing light bulbs, making wallpaper come loose and causing plumbing to fail.
• Global Frequency:
  • Used with more grounding in reality in the fifth issue. Disturbing subaudible frequencies are a major element of the mystery explored in the issue, and one character mentions the original Brown Note myth.
  • Also used in issue #3 with an alien invasion in the form of a signal containing an alien society in its entirety. Exposure is dangerous even in the form of programming code on a computer screen. Merely reading the code makes an agent's eyes bleed as she struggles to keep the information from reprogramming her mind.
• In Invincible, Viltrumites, including Mark (a human/Viltrumite hybrid), are Nigh-Invulnerable. They do have one weakness, however: sound waves at certain pitches. Viltrumites have sensitive inner ears, and with them, a delicate equilibrium that is key to their ability to fly. High-pitched sound waves can disrupt this equilibrium, grounding Viltrumites while inflicting severe pain and causing their ears to bleed. Prolonged exposure to these sound waves is said to even be capable of killing Viltrumites.
• The Invisibles must be the chief proponent of the trope, filled with "superdimensional" sounds and words with both positive and negative effects. There are sounds that cause rapid cancer, sounds that opens your consciousness similarly to an explosive, permanent LSD trip, sounds that make you throw up but only if you're a secret agent with multiple cover stories and at one point a hyperdimensional villain is defeated by the word "POP". (It makes him go pop.) It's even suggested that the alphabet itself is a Brown Note, the true name of a powerful demon that the Conspiracy uses to restrict human minds by inculcating the name as a sort of mantra in children.
• Irredeemable:
  • A sonic virus melts off its child victims' skin right down to their bones and animated their skeletons, spreading through the screams of the adult witnesses. On a more mundane level, the sheer trauma of dealing with the mess the virus made was a major contributing factor to the Plutonian going over the edge.
  • Orian, a demonic hunter, is summoned by merely reading (not aloud) a mystic sigil. He arrives in our world by ripping his way out through the victim's mouth.
• Iznogoud: Iznogoud once enlists the help of a woman so ugly that seeing her face without a veil causes people to be frozen in horror — literally (as in, they instantly become encased in a block of ice — the woman uses her power to keep her sherbet fresh). The reader never gets to see her face; she offers to do so in the last panel, which is followed by a note saying that the pencil writer did not complete this panel and gave a "frigid reception" to the people sent to retrieve it.
• Li'l Abner:
  • "Lena the Hyena" is supposed to be so ugly that the sight of her face causes insanity in Dogpatch residents and the reader, so her face isn't shown at first. Eventually, there was a contest to decide what she looked like. Basil Wolverton won.◊ Lena later made a cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (as a sex offender in Toontown).
  • Stupefyin' Jones is the opposite — she's so stunningly beautiful that any male who looks at her freezes, rooted to the spot. (She's a deadly hazard for any confirmed bachelor on Sadie Hawkins Day, and she often uses her powers then on purpose, simply for fun.) Her cousin Available Jones (who is always available — for a price) isn't above providing her power for a fee if anyone needs someone else subdued.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Agents of Atlas: Venus can affect minds with her song. She usually puts them in a state of pleasure, but when she finds out that she isn't a goddess, but rather a Siren, her wail creates a massive depression field.
  • Daredevil: Angar the Screamer has the power to cause nightmarish hallucinations by screaming. He then robs his victims while they're paralyzed with horror. Amnesia sets in after the effect fades, leaving the victims wondering where they've left their wallets.
  • Deadpool has a face horrifying enough to make Big Bertha throw up at the mere sight of it when he unmasks.
  • The Inhumans: The face of Dinu is so ugly that all who see it die.
  • In Secret Wars (2015), and shown in greater detail in the Siege mini-series, the Shield finally raises up and roars something so powerful it stuns everyone and causes their ears to pop. A translator able to piece together what he said revealed a three-word, five-syllable phrase: "It's Clobberin' Time!"
  • Spider-Man: Calypso can play the drums in such a way that it interferes with Peter's Spider-Sense.
• Memetic involves the viral spread of a picture of a sloth giving a thumbs up, which causes anyone who sees it to experience a wave of euphoria and turn into a screaming zombie not twelve hours later, among other things.
• MIND MGMT has multiple examples, ranging from messages inserted into advertisements that only psychic agents can see to Assassination Letters and Versus Verses, which kill anyone who reads or hears them, respectively.
• National Lampoon once ran a comic about Ugly Deirdre, a little girl who was so hideous that the sight of her face caused people to lose bowel control. A kind plastic surgeon tried to fix Deirdre's face... and the results were so horrible that anyone who looked at her would violently blind or kill themselves. The cartoonist spared us the sight of the after-surgery face by covering it with a black box labeled "TOO HIDEOUS FOR PUBLICATION".
• The Mike Allred comic, Red Rocket 7, featured a secret note of existence that if played, signaled the destruction of evil and the dawn of paradise. He used it to destroy an evil alien empire that was invading Earth (after it had taken over most of the universe) and signal the second coming of God.
• In Scott Pilgrim, the rival band "Crash and the Boys" has a song that is so epic, it knocks the audience unconscious for twenty to thirty minutes. (Its title is "Last Song Kills Audience".)
• When Marvel Comics had the Star Trek license, they did a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Dominion War crossover involving Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew and (barely, for obvious reasons) Kes from Star Trek: Voyager, set during the Dominion War, in which the Dominion tries to incapacitate all telepaths from the Alpha Quadrant with what amounts to an earworm. It flips the brains of those affected so that friends are enemies and enemies friends. When Bashir and Beverly Crusher figure it out, they fight it back with another earworm. (TNG telepaths like sharing thoughts on the aether.)
• In Tank Vixens, reading Gedda's diary is enough to make Firen and Sonya forget how FTL travel works.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye seems to like this trope:
  • Issue 4 to 5 feature a "sound bomb" created by a Mad Scientist named Pharma. Essentially it creates an incredibly loud booming sound; this sound creates a signal that's somehow laced with a virus. The virus causes the coolants, anti-rusting agents, and other fluids in Transformer-bodies to mix and congeal with each other when the victim transforms. This causes the infected person to literally rust away, slowly dissolving bit by bit.
  • The annual has an ancient being called a Metrotitian. The screams of this being can only be heard or interpreted by comatose people or Transformers with a Matrix connection. That's not what qualifies it for this trope. What qualifies it for this trope is the discovery that its screams raise the dead.
  • A recurring plot point involves a musical score called The Empyrean Suite. The music itself is fairly harmless when played on its own. However it has connections to something absolutely horrifying; so horrifying that upon learning the music's significance, Chromedome refuses to ever speak of it again and expresses his hope that Skids never learns the truth behind for the sake of his sanity. Turns out Skids had been tricked into building a smelting furnace for Autobot POWs in Grindcore prison. The Empyrean Suite was the music played to drown out the screams.
  • Tarn, the leader of Decepticon Justice Division, possesses an ability referred to as "Weaponized Conversation". His voice has unique modulation, which, when moved in time with the pulse of listener's Spark, can make it weaker by lowering his voice. Then he talks lower, and lower, and lower, until the Spark just gives up and explodes, destroying a Transformer.
• Transmetropolitan:
  • A literal brown note comes in the form of the bowel disruptor gun, which has settings including "loose", "watery" and "prolapse". And more creative later settings like "Intestinal Maelstrom", "Unspeakable Gut Horror", "Rectal Volcano", and everyone's favorite, "Shat into Unconsciousness".
  • The buybombs are a momentary flash of concentrated subliminal advertising coming from the TV screen, which then causes those exposed to see the commercials in their dreams as they sleep.
• The Umbrella Academy: In the story arc "The Apocalypse Suite", the antagonist has constructed an orchestra of the sadistic and suicidal to play a symphony that will end the world. Similarly, The White Violin is capable of making heads explode and bodies tear themselves apart by just barely scraping her strings.

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