Speech balloon
Encyclopedia
Speech balloons are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic book
s, comic strip
s and cartoon
s to allow words (and much less often, pictures) to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character in the comic. There is often a formal distinction between the balloon that indicates thoughts and the one that indicates words spoken aloud: the bubble that conveys subjective thoughts is often referred to as a thought balloon.
One of the earliest antecedents to the modern speech bubble were the “speech scroll
s”, wispy lines that connected first person speech to the mouths of the speakers in Mesoamerican art.
In Western graphic art, labels that reveal what a pictured figure is saying have appeared since at least the 13th century. Word balloons (also known as 'banderoles') began appearing in 18th century printed broadsides and political cartoons from the American Revolution often used them. http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/erelrev.htmhttp://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/ykid/illustrated.htm With the development of the comics
industry in the 20th century, the appearance of speech balloons has become increasingly standardized, though the formal conventions that have evolved in different cultures (USA as opposed to Japan, for example), can be quite distinct.
The Yellow Kid is generally credited as the first American comic strip character. His words initially appeared on his yellow shirt but word balloons very much like those in use today were added almost immediately, as early as 1896. By the start of the 20th century the use of word balloons was ubiquitous, and since that time only a very few comic strips and comic books have relied on captions, notably Hal Foster's Prince Valiant
and the early Tarzan comic strip
. For many years, word balloons were less common in Europe than in the USA, or were used together with captions. One example is the Dutch
cartoonist Marten Toonder
's comics about Tom Puss
and Oliver B. Bumble
, where the literary captions are printed out below the strip and almost take up as much space as the drawings, so that the strip fills twice the space of most newspaper strips. A similar example from the UK is Rupert Bear
.
When one character has multiple balloons within a panel, often only the balloon nearest to the speaker's head has a tail, and the others are connected to it in sequence by narrow bands. This style is often used in Mad Magazine, due to its "call-and-response" dialogue-based humor.
An off-panel character (the comic book equivalent of being "off screen") has several options, some of them rather unconventional. The first is a standard speech bubble with a tail pointing toward the speaker's position. The second option, which originated in manga
, has the tail pointing into the bubble, instead of out. (This tail is still pointing towards the speaker.) The third option replaces the tail with a sort of bottleneck that connects with the side of the panel. It can be seen in the works of graphic novel
ist Marjane Satrapi
(author of Persepolis
).
In American comics, a bubble without a tail means that the speaker is not merely outside the reader's field of view but invisible to the viewpoint character
, often as an unspecified member of a crowd.
Characters distant (in space or time) from the scene of the panel can still speak, in squared bubbles without a tail; this usage, equivalent to voice-over
in film, is not uncommon in American comics for dramatic contrast. In contrast to captions, the corners of such balloons never coincide with those of the panel; for further distinction they often have a double outline, a different background color, or quotation mark
s.
The chain thought bubble is the almost universal symbol for thinking in cartoons. It consists of a large, cloud
-like bubble containing the text of the thought, which is connected to the area next to a character by a chain of increasingly smaller circular bubbles.
Often animal characters like Snoopy
and Garfield
"talk" using thought bubbles.
Another, less conventional thought bubble has emerged: the "fuzzy" thought bubble. Used in manga (by such artists as Ken Akamatsu
), the fuzzy bubble is roughly circular in shape (generally), but the edge of the bubble is not a line but a collection of spikes close to each other, creating the impression of fuzziness. Fuzzy thought bubbles do not use tails, and are placed in the area of the character who is thinking. This has the advantage of reflecting the TV equivalent effect: something said with an echo.
Writers and artists can refuse to use thought bubbles, expressing the action through spoken dialogue and drawing; they are sometimes seen as an inefficient method of expressing thought because they are attached directly to the head of the thinker, unlike methods such as caption boxes, which can be used both as an expression of thought and narration while existing in an entirely different panel from the character thinking. However, they are restricted to the current viewpoint character. An example is Alan Moore
and David Lloyd
's V for Vendetta
, wherein during one chapter, a monologue expressed in captions serves not only to express the thoughts of a character but also the mood, status and actions of three others.
Some characters and strips use highly unconventional methods of communication. Perhaps the most notable is the Yellow Kid, an early American
comic strip
. His (but not the other characters') words would appear on his large, smock-like shirt.
Also noteworthy are the many variations on the form created by Dave Sim
for his comic Cerebus the Aardvark
. Depending on the shape, size, and position of the bubble, as well as the texture and shape of the letters within it, Sim could convey large amounts of information about the speaker. This included separate bubbles for different states of mind (drunkenness, etc.), for echoes, and a special class of bubbles for one single floating apparition.
An early pioneer in experimenting with many different types of speech balloons and lettering for different types of speech was Walt Kelly
, in his Pogo strip. Deacon Mushrat speaks in blackletter
, P.T. Bridgeport speaks in circus posters, Sarcophagus MacAbre speaks in condolence cards, "Mr. Pig" (a take on Nikita Khrushchev
) speaks in faux Cyrillic
, etc.
In the famous French comic series Asterix
, Goscinny
and Uderzo
use bubbles without tails to indicate a distant or unseen speaker. They also have had fun experimenting with many different types of lettering to suit characters with distinct nationalities, thus meaning they speak a different language that Asterix may not understand, but the readers can. So Goths speak in blackletter
, Greeks in angular lettering (though always understood by the Gaulish main characters, so it's more of an accent than a language), Norse with "Nørdic åccents", Egyptians in faux hieroglyphs
(depictive illustrations and rebuses) etc. Another original experiment with speech bubbles was exclusive to one album, Asterix and the Roman Agent
. The agent in question was a vile manipulator who could create dissension amongst any group of people with a single innocent-sounding comment. His victims start quarreling and ultimately fighting each other while speaking in green-colored speech bubbles, which symbolize darnel.
Font variation is a common tactic in comics. The Sandman
series, written by Neil Gaiman
, features many characters whose speech bubbles are written with a font that is exclusive to them. Some examples: the main character, the gloomy Dream speaks in wavy-edged bubbles, completely black, with similarly wavy white lettering. His sister, the scatterbrained and whimsical Delirium
speaks in bubbles in a many-colored explosive background with uneven lettering, and the irreverent raven Matthew speaks in a shaky angular kind of bubble with scratchy lettering. Other characters, such as John Dee, have special shapes of bubbles for their own.
In MAD Magazine, in the recurring "Monroe" comic strip, certain words are written larger or in unusual fonts for emphasis.
In manga
, there is a tendency to include the speech necessary for the storyline in balloons, while small scribbles outside the balloons add side comments, often used for irony or to show that they're said in a much smaller voice. Satsuki Yotsuba in the manga series Negima is notable because she speaks almost entirely in side scribble.
(?) (often drawn by hand, not counted as part of the lettering) denotes confusion or ignorance. An exclamation mark
(!) indicates surprise or terror. This device is broadly used in the European comic tradition, the Belgian artist Hergé
's The Adventures of Tintin
series being a good example. In other countries, the punctuation marks stand alone above the character's head, with no bubble needed.
In manga
, the ellipsis
(i.e. three dots) is also used to express silence in a much more significant way than the mere absence of bubbles. This is specially seen when a character is supposed to say something, to indicate a stunned silence or when a sarcastic comment is expected by the reader. The ellipsis, along with the big drop of sweat on the character's temple—usually depicting shame, confusion, or embarrassment caused by other people's actions— is one of the Japan
ese graphic symbols that have taken root in comics all around the world, although they are still rare in Western tradition. Japanese even has a sound effect for "deafening silence," .
Gilbert Hernandez
's series about Palomar
is written in English, but supposed to take place mainly in a Hispanic
country. Thus, what's supposed to be representations of Spanish
speech is written without brackets, but occasional actual English speech is written within brackets, to indicate that it is unintelligible to the main Hispanophone
characters in the series.
Some comics will have the actual foreign language in the speech balloon, with the translation as a footnote; this is done with Latin aphorisms in Asterix.
Another convention is to put the foreign speech in a distinctive lettering style; for example, Asterix's Goths
speak in blackletter
.
comics that the sound of a snore can be reduced to a single letter Z. Thus a speech bubble with this letter standing all alone (again, drawn by hand rather than a font type) means the character is sleeping in most humorous comics. This can be seen, for instance, in Charles Schulz's Peanuts
comic strips.
Being such a long-established device, the Z-bubble does not even imply that the character is snoring
anymore, but just sleeping. Jim Davis
has based some jokes starring Garfield
upon this technique; for example, in one strip, Garfield is unable to sleep because his Z-bubble is pointing in the wrong direction. When he grabs the bubble's tail to make it point at himself, he falls asleep.
Originally, the resemblance between the 'z' sound and that of a snore seemed exclusive to the English language
, but the spread of American comics has made it a frequent feature in other countries. An exception to this is in Japanese manga, where the usual symbol for sleep is a large bubble coming out of the character's nose.
' Melody Valentine, a character in their Josie and the Pussycats
comic, has musical notes drawn into her word balloons at all times, to convey that she speaks in a sing-song voice.
The above mentioned Albert Uderzo in the Asterix series decorates speech bubbles with beautiful flowers depicting an extremely soft, sweet voice (usually preceding a violent outburst by the same character).
A stormy cloud with a rough lightning sticking out of it, either in a bubble or just floating above the character's head as a modified 'cloudy' thought bubble, depicts anger, not always verbally expressed.
Light bulbs are sometimes used when the character comes up with an idea or solution to a problem.
In the Western world, it is common to replace profanity with a string of nonsense symbols (&%$@*$#), sometimes called grawlixes
. In comics that are usually addressed to children or teenagers, bad language is censored
by replacing it with more or less elaborate drawings and expressionistic symbols. For example, instead of calling someone a swine, a pig is drawn in the speech bubble.
One example is the Spanish
Mortadelo series, created by Francisco Ibáñez
. Although not specifically addressed to children, Mortadelo was born during Francisco Franco
's dictatorship
, when censorship was the order of the day and the slightest attempt of rough language was prohibited. When Ibáñez's characters are angry, donkey heads, lightning, lavatories, billy goats and even faux Japanese characters are often seen in their bubbles.
When Mortadelo was portrayed on film by Spanish director Javier Fesser
in 2003, one of the critiques made to his otherwise successful adaptation was the character's use of words that never appeared in the comics. Fesser claimed: "When you see a bubble speech containing a lightning falling on a pig, what do you imagine the character's saying?"
, the bubbles are read from left to right in a panel, while in Japanese
, it is the other way around. Sometimes the bubbles are "stacked", with two characters having multiple bubbles, one above the other. Such stacks are read from the top down. Poor use of speech balloons can unintentionally make the proper reading order ambiguous, confusing the reader.
would draw in all the individual letters in the balloons and sound effects by hand. A modern alternative, used by most comics today and universal in English-translated manga, is to letter with computer programs. The font
s used usually emulate the style of hand-lettering.
Traditionally, most mainstream comic books are lettered entirely in upper-case, with a few exceptions:
In a few comics, uppercase and lowercase are used as in ordinary writing. Since the mid-1980s, mixed case lettering has gradually become more widely used in mainstream books.
Recently, Marvel Comics
experimented with mixed case lettering in all its books. Most mainstream titles have since returned to traditional all upper-case lettering but titles specifically marketed to younger readers or a more manga
audience such as the Marvel Adventures line, Runaways
and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane
have retained mixed case lettering.
In many comics, although the lettering is entirely in capital letters, serif
versions of "I" are used exclusively where a capital I would appear in normal print text, and a sanserif (i.e., a simple vertical line) is used in all other places. This reduces confusion with the number one, and also serves to indicate when the personal pronoun "I" is meant. This lettering convention can be seen in computer fonts such as Blambot
's "DigitalStrip.ttf" and "AnimeAce.ttf" fonts, which make no other distinction between lower- and uppercase letters.
, for example, the notes played by Schroeder
occasionally take substance and are used in various ways, including Christmas decorations or perches for birds. Sometimes balloons can be influenced by the strip's environment: in the Italian strip Sturmtruppen
they freeze and crack when the temperature is very low, or an Archie comic strip where two men from Alaska remarked on how cold it was, by saying the speech balloons froze as they said them, and the words had to be thawed out to be heard.
In the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
, the last words of a murdered Toon (cartoon character) are found under his body in the form of a speech balloon.
for Microsoft Windows
, Comic Life
for Mac OS X
and Windows target the non-professional end of the market.
TXTual Healing is a street art performance that involves strategically projecting interactive speech bubbles onto the facade of a building, as if they are coming out of the doors and windows. Using a computer paired with a cell phone, people in the street can generate their own content for the bubbles by sending in an SMS message.
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
s, comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
s and cartoon
Cartoon
A cartoon is a form of two-dimensional illustrated visual art. While the specific definition has changed over time, modern usage refers to a typically non-realistic or semi-realistic drawing or painting intended for satire, caricature, or humor, or to the artistic style of such works...
s to allow words (and much less often, pictures) to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character in the comic. There is often a formal distinction between the balloon that indicates thoughts and the one that indicates words spoken aloud: the bubble that conveys subjective thoughts is often referred to as a thought balloon.
History
Speech scroll
A speech scroll, also called a banderole in Western art history, is an illustrative device used to denote speech, song, or, in rarer cases, other types of sound....
s”, wispy lines that connected first person speech to the mouths of the speakers in Mesoamerican art.
In Western graphic art, labels that reveal what a pictured figure is saying have appeared since at least the 13th century. Word balloons (also known as 'banderoles') began appearing in 18th century printed broadsides and political cartoons from the American Revolution often used them. http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/erelrev.htmhttp://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/ykid/illustrated.htm With the development of the comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...
industry in the 20th century, the appearance of speech balloons has become increasingly standardized, though the formal conventions that have evolved in different cultures (USA as opposed to Japan, for example), can be quite distinct.
The Yellow Kid is generally credited as the first American comic strip character. His words initially appeared on his yellow shirt but word balloons very much like those in use today were added almost immediately, as early as 1896. By the start of the 20th century the use of word balloons was ubiquitous, and since that time only a very few comic strips and comic books have relied on captions, notably Hal Foster's Prince Valiant
Prince Valiant
Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur, or simply Prince Valiant, is a long-run comic strip created by Hal Foster in 1937. It is an epic adventure that has told a continuous story during its entire history, and the full stretch of that story now totals more than 3700 Sunday strips...
and the early Tarzan comic strip
Tarzan (comics)
Tarzan, a fictional character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, first appeared in the 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes, and then in 23 sequels. The character proved immensely popular and quickly made the jump to other media, including comics.-Comic strips:...
. For many years, word balloons were less common in Europe than in the USA, or were used together with captions. One example is the Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
cartoonist Marten Toonder
Marten Toonder
Marten Toonder was a Dutch comic creator, born in Rotterdam. He was probably the most successful comic artist in the Netherlands and had a great influence in the Dutch language by introducing new words and expressions....
's comics about Tom Puss
Tom Puss
Tom Puss is a fictional anthropomorphic cat and one of the two main characters, the other being Oliver B. Bumble Tom Puss (Tom Poes in Dutch language) is a fictional anthropomorphic cat and one of the two main characters, the other being Oliver B. Bumble Tom Puss (Tom Poes in Dutch language) is a...
and Oliver B. Bumble
Oliver B. Bumble
Oliver B. Bumble is a fictional anthropomorphic bear and one of the , the other being Tom Puss in an originally Dutch series of comic books bearing the name of either one main characters in their name, written by Marten Toonder.-Publication history:The first Tom Puss stories were told as...
, where the literary captions are printed out below the strip and almost take up as much space as the drawings, so that the strip fills twice the space of most newspaper strips. A similar example from the UK is Rupert Bear
Rupert Bear
Rupert Bear is a children's comic strip character, who features in a series of books based around his adventures. The character was created by the English artist Mary Tourtel and first appeared in the Daily Express on 8 November 1920. Rupert's initial purpose was to win sales from the rival...
.
Speech bubbles
The most common is the speech bubble. It comes in two forms for two circumstances: An in-panel character and an off-panel character. An in-panel character (one who is fully or mostly visible in the panel of the strip of comic that the reader is viewing) uses a bubble with a pointer, called a tail, directed towards the speaker.When one character has multiple balloons within a panel, often only the balloon nearest to the speaker's head has a tail, and the others are connected to it in sequence by narrow bands. This style is often used in Mad Magazine, due to its "call-and-response" dialogue-based humor.
An off-panel character (the comic book equivalent of being "off screen") has several options, some of them rather unconventional. The first is a standard speech bubble with a tail pointing toward the speaker's position. The second option, which originated in manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
, has the tail pointing into the bubble, instead of out. (This tail is still pointing towards the speaker.) The third option replaces the tail with a sort of bottleneck that connects with the side of the panel. It can be seen in the works of graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
ist Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French contemporary graphic novelist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author...
(author of Persepolis
Persepolis (graphic novel)
Persepolis is a French-language autobiographical comic by Marjane Satrapi depicting her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. The title is a reference to the ancient capital of the Persian Empire, Persepolis....
).
In American comics, a bubble without a tail means that the speaker is not merely outside the reader's field of view but invisible to the viewpoint character
Point of view (literature)
The narrative mode is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode...
, often as an unspecified member of a crowd.
Characters distant (in space or time) from the scene of the panel can still speak, in squared bubbles without a tail; this usage, equivalent to voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...
in film, is not uncommon in American comics for dramatic contrast. In contrast to captions, the corners of such balloons never coincide with those of the panel; for further distinction they often have a double outline, a different background color, or quotation mark
Quotation mark
Quotation marks or inverted commas are punctuation marks at the beginning and end of a quotation, direct speech, literal title or name. Quotation marks can also be used to indicate a different meaning of a word or phrase than the one typically associated with it and are often used to express irony...
s.
Thought bubbles
Thought bubbles come in two forms: the chain thought bubble and the "fuzzy" bubble.The chain thought bubble is the almost universal symbol for thinking in cartoons. It consists of a large, cloud
Cloud
A cloud is a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals made of water and/or various chemicals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of a planetary body. They are also known as aerosols. Clouds in Earth's atmosphere are studied in the cloud physics branch of meteorology...
-like bubble containing the text of the thought, which is connected to the area next to a character by a chain of increasingly smaller circular bubbles.
Often animal characters like Snoopy
Snoopy
Snoopy is an fictional character in the long-running comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. He is Charlie Brown's pet beagle. Snoopy began his life in the strip as a fairly conventional dog, but eventually evolved into perhaps the strip's most dynamic character—and among the most recognizable...
and Garfield
Garfield (character)
Garfield is a fictional character and the title protagonist from the comic strip Garfield created by Jim Davis.-Personality:Garfield is an anthropomorphic ginger cat. He loves eating , and sleeping. He is teased about being overweight. He is also selfish...
"talk" using thought bubbles.
Another, less conventional thought bubble has emerged: the "fuzzy" thought bubble. Used in manga (by such artists as Ken Akamatsu
Ken Akamatsu
is a Japanese manga artist from Tokyo.Sailor Moon was his introduction to anime and manga fandom.In his teens, Akamatsu applied himself to Film Study . Eventually, he became famous as an illustrator featured in Comiket . He used the pen name...
), the fuzzy bubble is roughly circular in shape (generally), but the edge of the bubble is not a line but a collection of spikes close to each other, creating the impression of fuzziness. Fuzzy thought bubbles do not use tails, and are placed in the area of the character who is thinking. This has the advantage of reflecting the TV equivalent effect: something said with an echo.
Writers and artists can refuse to use thought bubbles, expressing the action through spoken dialogue and drawing; they are sometimes seen as an inefficient method of expressing thought because they are attached directly to the head of the thinker, unlike methods such as caption boxes, which can be used both as an expression of thought and narration while existing in an entirely different panel from the character thinking. However, they are restricted to the current viewpoint character. An example is Alan Moore
Alan Moore
Alan Oswald Moore is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell...
and David Lloyd
David Lloyd (comic artist)
David Lloyd is a British comics artist best known as the illustrator of the story V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore.-Career:...
's V for Vendetta
V for Vendetta
V for Vendetta is a ten-issue comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s to about the 1990s. A mysterious masked revolutionary who calls himself "V" works to destroy the totalitarian government,...
, wherein during one chapter, a monologue expressed in captions serves not only to express the thoughts of a character but also the mood, status and actions of three others.
Other forms
The shape of a speech balloon can be used to convey further information. Common ones include the following:- Scream bubbles indicate a character is screaming or shouting, usually with a jagged outline or a thicker line which can be colored. Their lettering is usually larger or bolder than normal.
- Broadcast bubbles (also known as radio bubbles) may have a jagged tail like the conventional drawing of a lightning flash and either a squared-off or jagged outline. Letters are sometimes italicised without also being bold. Broadcast bubbles indicate that the speaker is communicating through an electronic device, such as a radio or television, or is robotic.
- Whisper bubbles are usually portrayed with a dashed (dotted) outline, smaller font or gray lettering, which indicates the tone is softer as most speech is printed in black. They indicate that the speaker is whispering.
Another form, sometimes encountered in manga, looks like an occidental thought bubble. - Icicle bubbles have jagged "icicles" on the lower edge, representing "cold" hostility. Similarly the speech balloons of monsters may have an outline that suggests dripping blood or slime.
- Colored bubbles convey the emotion that goes with the speech, such as red for anger or green for envy. This style is seldom used in modern comics.
Captions
Captions are generally used for narration purposes. They are generally rectangular and positioned near the edge of the panel. Often they are also colored to indicate the difference between them and the bubbles used by the characters, which are almost always white.Artist-specific variations
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
. His (but not the other characters') words would appear on his large, smock-like shirt.
Also noteworthy are the many variations on the form created by Dave Sim
Dave Sim
David Victor Sim is an award-winning Canadian comic book writer and artist.A pioneer of self-published comics and creators' rights, Sim is best known as the creator of Cerebus the Aardvark, a comic book published from 1977 to 2004, which chronicles its main character in a 6,000-page self-contained...
for his comic Cerebus the Aardvark
Cerebus the Aardvark
Cerebus the Aardvark, or simply Cerebus , is an independent comic book, written and illustrated by Canadian artist Dave Sim, with backgrounds by fellow Canadian Gerhard. Cerebus ran for 300 issues from December 1977 to 2004, and was over 6000 pages long, the longest-running original...
. Depending on the shape, size, and position of the bubble, as well as the texture and shape of the letters within it, Sim could convey large amounts of information about the speaker. This included separate bubbles for different states of mind (drunkenness, etc.), for echoes, and a special class of bubbles for one single floating apparition.
An early pioneer in experimenting with many different types of speech balloons and lettering for different types of speech was Walt Kelly
Walt Kelly
Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr. , or Walt Kelly, was an American animator and cartoonist, best known for the comic strip, Pogo. He began his animation career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios, contributing to Pinocchio and Fantasia. Kelly resigned in 1941 at the age of 28 to work at Post-Hall Syndicate,...
, in his Pogo strip. Deacon Mushrat speaks in blackletter
Blackletter
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
, P.T. Bridgeport speaks in circus posters, Sarcophagus MacAbre speaks in condolence cards, "Mr. Pig" (a take on Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
) speaks in faux Cyrillic
Faux Cyrillic
Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia, regardless of whether the letters are phonetic matches. For example, R and N in RUSSIAN may be replaced by Cyrillic Я and И, giving "ЯUSSIAИ"...
, etc.
In the famous French comic series Asterix
Asterix
Asterix or The Adventures of Asterix is a series of French comic books written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo . The series first appeared in French in the magazine Pilote on October 29, 1959...
, Goscinny
René Goscinny
René Goscinny was a French comics editor and writer, who is best known for the comic book Astérix, which he created with illustrator Albert Uderzo, and for his work on the comic series Lucky Luke with Morris and Iznogoud with Jean Tabary.-Early life:Goscinny was born in Paris in 1926, to a family...
and Uderzo
Albert Uderzo
Albert Uderzo is a French comic book artist, and scriptwriter. He is best known for his work on the Astérix series, but also drew other comics such as Oumpah-pah, also in collaboration with René Goscinny.-Early life:...
use bubbles without tails to indicate a distant or unseen speaker. They also have had fun experimenting with many different types of lettering to suit characters with distinct nationalities, thus meaning they speak a different language that Asterix may not understand, but the readers can. So Goths speak in blackletter
Blackletter
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
, Greeks in angular lettering (though always understood by the Gaulish main characters, so it's more of an accent than a language), Norse with "Nørdic åccents", Egyptians in faux hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
(depictive illustrations and rebuses) etc. Another original experiment with speech bubbles was exclusive to one album, Asterix and the Roman Agent
Asterix and the Roman Agent
Asterix and the Roman Agent is the fifteenth volume of the Asterix comic book series, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo...
. The agent in question was a vile manipulator who could create dissension amongst any group of people with a single innocent-sounding comment. His victims start quarreling and ultimately fighting each other while speaking in green-colored speech bubbles, which symbolize darnel.
Font variation is a common tactic in comics. The Sandman
Sandman (Vertigo)
The Sandman is a comic book series written by Neil Gaiman and published by DC Comics. Beginning with issue #47, it was placed under the imprint Vertigo. It chronicles the adventures of Dream , who rules over the world of dreams. It ran for 75 issues from January 1989 until March 1996...
series, written by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard Gaiman born 10 November 1960)is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book...
, features many characters whose speech bubbles are written with a font that is exclusive to them. Some examples: the main character, the gloomy Dream speaks in wavy-edged bubbles, completely black, with similarly wavy white lettering. His sister, the scatterbrained and whimsical Delirium
Delirium (DC Comics)
Delirium is one of The Endless, fictional characters from Neil Gaiman's comic book series The Sandman.-Fictional character history:Delirium, known to the Greek culture as Mania, is the youngest of the Endless, yet still older than the rest of existence. She is usually quite short, and thin, and...
speaks in bubbles in a many-colored explosive background with uneven lettering, and the irreverent raven Matthew speaks in a shaky angular kind of bubble with scratchy lettering. Other characters, such as John Dee, have special shapes of bubbles for their own.
In MAD Magazine, in the recurring "Monroe" comic strip, certain words are written larger or in unusual fonts for emphasis.
In manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
, there is a tendency to include the speech necessary for the storyline in balloons, while small scribbles outside the balloons add side comments, often used for irony or to show that they're said in a much smaller voice. Satsuki Yotsuba in the manga series Negima is notable because she speaks almost entirely in side scribble.
Graphic symbols in speech bubbles
Speech bubbles are used not only to include a character's words, but also emotions, voice inflections and unspecified language.Punctuation marks
One of the universal emblems of the art of comics is the use of a single punctuation mark to depict a character's emotions, much more efficiently than any possible sentence. A speech bubble with a single big question markQuestion mark
The question mark , is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence in English and many other languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions...
(?) (often drawn by hand, not counted as part of the lettering) denotes confusion or ignorance. An exclamation mark
Exclamation mark
The exclamation mark, exclamation point, or bang, or "dembanger" is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume , and often marks the end of a sentence. Example: “Watch out!” The character is encoded in Unicode at...
(!) indicates surprise or terror. This device is broadly used in the European comic tradition, the Belgian artist Hergé
Hergé
Georges Prosper Remi , better known by the pen name Hergé, was a Belgian comics writer and artist. His best known and most substantial work is the 23 completed comic books in The Adventures of Tintin series, which he wrote and illustrated from 1929 until his death in 1983, although he was also...
's The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist , who wrote under the pen name of Hergé...
series being a good example. In other countries, the punctuation marks stand alone above the character's head, with no bubble needed.
In manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
, the ellipsis
Ellipsis
Ellipsis is a series of marks that usually indicate an intentional omission of a word, sentence or whole section from the original text being quoted. An ellipsis can also be used to indicate an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence...
(i.e. three dots) is also used to express silence in a much more significant way than the mere absence of bubbles. This is specially seen when a character is supposed to say something, to indicate a stunned silence or when a sarcastic comment is expected by the reader. The ellipsis, along with the big drop of sweat on the character's temple—usually depicting shame, confusion, or embarrassment caused by other people's actions— is one of the Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese graphic symbols that have taken root in comics all around the world, although they are still rare in Western tradition. Japanese even has a sound effect for "deafening silence," .
Foreign languages
In many comic books, words that would be foreign to the narration but are displayed in translation for the reader are surrounded by angle brackets or chevrons <like this>.Gilbert Hernandez
Gilbert Hernandez
Gilberto Hernández, born February 1, 1957, in Oxnard, California, usually credited as Gilbert Hernandez and also known by the nickname Beto , is an American comics writer/artist...
's series about Palomar
Love and Rockets (comics)
Love and Rockets is a black and white comic book series by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez, sometimes cited jointly as Los Bros Hernandez. Their brother Mario Hernandez is an occasional contributor...
is written in English, but supposed to take place mainly in a Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
country. Thus, what's supposed to be representations of Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
speech is written without brackets, but occasional actual English speech is written within brackets, to indicate that it is unintelligible to the main Hispanophone
Hispanophone
Hispanophone or Hispanosphere denotes Spanish language speakers and the Spanish-speaking world. The word derives from the Latin political name of the Iberian Peninsula, Hispania, which comprised basically the territory of the modern states of Spain and Portugal.Hispanophones are estimated at...
characters in the series.
Some comics will have the actual foreign language in the speech balloon, with the translation as a footnote; this is done with Latin aphorisms in Asterix.
Another convention is to put the foreign speech in a distinctive lettering style; for example, Asterix's Goths
Asterix and the Goths
Asterix and the Goths is the third volume of the Asterix comic book series, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo . It was first published in 1963 in French and translated into English in 1974.-Plot summary:...
speak in blackletter
Blackletter
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
.
The big Z
It is a convention in AmericanUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
comics that the sound of a snore can be reduced to a single letter Z. Thus a speech bubble with this letter standing all alone (again, drawn by hand rather than a font type) means the character is sleeping in most humorous comics. This can be seen, for instance, in Charles Schulz's Peanuts
Peanuts
Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward...
comic strips.
Being such a long-established device, the Z-bubble does not even imply that the character is snoring
Snoring
Snoring is the vibration of respiratory structures and the resulting sound, due to obstructed air movement during breathing while sleeping. In some cases the sound may be soft, but in other cases, it can be loud and unpleasant...
anymore, but just sleeping. Jim Davis
Jim Davis (cartoonist)
James Robert Davis is an American cartoonist, best known as the creator of the comic strip Garfield, which he signs as Jim Davis. He has also worked on other strips: Tumbleweeds, Gnorm Gnat, U.S. Acres and a strip about Mr...
has based some jokes starring Garfield
Garfield
Garfield is a comic strip created by Jim Davis. Published since June 19, 1978, it chronicles the life of the title character, the cat Garfield ; his owner, Jon Arbuckle; and Arbuckle's dog, Odie...
upon this technique; for example, in one strip, Garfield is unable to sleep because his Z-bubble is pointing in the wrong direction. When he grabs the bubble's tail to make it point at himself, he falls asleep.
Originally, the resemblance between the 'z' sound and that of a snore seemed exclusive to the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, but the spread of American comics has made it a frequent feature in other countries. An exception to this is in Japanese manga, where the usual symbol for sleep is a large bubble coming out of the character's nose.
Drawings within the speech bubble
Singing characters usually have musical notes drawn into their word balloons. Archie ComicsArchie Comics
Archie Comics is an American comic book publisher headquartered in the Village of Mamaroneck, Town of Mamaroneck, New York, known for its many series featuring the fictional teenagers Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle and Jughead Jones. The characters were created by...
' Melody Valentine, a character in their Josie and the Pussycats
Josie and the Pussycats (comic)
Josie and the Pussycats is a teen-humor comic book about a fictional rock band, created by Dan DeCarlo and published by Archie Comics. It was published from 1963 until 1982; since then, a number of one-shot issues have appeared without regularity...
comic, has musical notes drawn into her word balloons at all times, to convey that she speaks in a sing-song voice.
The above mentioned Albert Uderzo in the Asterix series decorates speech bubbles with beautiful flowers depicting an extremely soft, sweet voice (usually preceding a violent outburst by the same character).
A stormy cloud with a rough lightning sticking out of it, either in a bubble or just floating above the character's head as a modified 'cloudy' thought bubble, depicts anger, not always verbally expressed.
Light bulbs are sometimes used when the character comes up with an idea or solution to a problem.
In the Western world, it is common to replace profanity with a string of nonsense symbols (&%$@*$#), sometimes called grawlixes
The Lexicon of Comicana
The Lexicon of Comicana is a book that was written in 1980 by American cartoonist Mort Walker. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the devices cartoonists utilize in their craft. In it, Walker invented an international set of symbols called Symbolia after researching cartoons around the...
. In comics that are usually addressed to children or teenagers, bad language is censored
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
by replacing it with more or less elaborate drawings and expressionistic symbols. For example, instead of calling someone a swine, a pig is drawn in the speech bubble.
One example is the Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
Mortadelo series, created by Francisco Ibáñez
Francisco Ibáñez Talavera
Francisco Ibáñez Talavera , Spanish comic book artist and writer. Born in Barcelona, he is the creator of several comic book series, the most famous of which is Mortadelo y Filemón....
. Although not specifically addressed to children, Mortadelo was born during Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
's dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
, when censorship was the order of the day and the slightest attempt of rough language was prohibited. When Ibáñez's characters are angry, donkey heads, lightning, lavatories, billy goats and even faux Japanese characters are often seen in their bubbles.
When Mortadelo was portrayed on film by Spanish director Javier Fesser
Javier Fesser
Javier Fesser is a Spanish film director and publicist.Fesser earned his degree in Communication studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid...
in 2003, one of the critiques made to his otherwise successful adaptation was the character's use of words that never appeared in the comics. Fesser claimed: "When you see a bubble speech containing a lightning falling on a pig, what do you imagine the character's saying?"
Order
In order for comic strip and graphic novel dialogue to make sense, it has to be read in order. Thus, conventions have evolved in the order in which the communication bubbles are read. The individual bubbles are read in the order of the language. For example, in EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, the bubbles are read from left to right in a panel, while in Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, it is the other way around. Sometimes the bubbles are "stacked", with two characters having multiple bubbles, one above the other. Such stacks are read from the top down. Poor use of speech balloons can unintentionally make the proper reading order ambiguous, confusing the reader.
Lettering
Traditionally, a cartoonist or occupational lettererLetterer
A letterer is a member of a team of comic book creators responsible for drawing the comic book's text. The letterer's use of typefaces, calligraphy, letter size, and layout all contribute to the impact of the comic. The letterer crafts the comic's "display lettering": the story title lettering and...
would draw in all the individual letters in the balloons and sound effects by hand. A modern alternative, used by most comics today and universal in English-translated manga, is to letter with computer programs. The font
Font
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
s used usually emulate the style of hand-lettering.
Traditionally, most mainstream comic books are lettered entirely in upper-case, with a few exceptions:
- Name particles such as de and von, and the "c" in a surnameSurnameA surname is a name added to a given name and is part of a personal name. In many cases, a surname is a family name. Many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name"...
of Scottish or Irish origin starting with Mc - To indicate a frightened or quiet manner of speech
- An interjection such as "er", "um", etc.
In a few comics, uppercase and lowercase are used as in ordinary writing. Since the mid-1980s, mixed case lettering has gradually become more widely used in mainstream books.
Recently, Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...
experimented with mixed case lettering in all its books. Most mainstream titles have since returned to traditional all upper-case lettering but titles specifically marketed to younger readers or a more manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
audience such as the Marvel Adventures line, Runaways
Runaways (comics)
Runaways is a comic book series published by Marvel Comics. The series features a group of teenagers who discover that their parents are part of an evil crime group called the Pride. Created by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, the series debuted in April of 2003 as part of Marvel Comics'...
and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane
Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane
Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane is an American comic book series focusing on a teenage Mary Jane, the love interest of superhero Spider-Man. The series, published by Marvel Comics, is a teen drama set outside the regular Marvel continuity, and aimed at teenage girls, as opposed to the traditional male...
have retained mixed case lettering.
In many comics, although the lettering is entirely in capital letters, serif
Serif
In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface with serifs is called a serif typeface . A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”...
versions of "I" are used exclusively where a capital I would appear in normal print text, and a sanserif (i.e., a simple vertical line) is used in all other places. This reduces confusion with the number one, and also serves to indicate when the personal pronoun "I" is meant. This lettering convention can be seen in computer fonts such as Blambot
Blambot
Blambot is the name of an online type foundry and is the alias of freeware and shareware computer font designer Nate Piekos. Blambot specializes in script and display typefaces for use as lettering in both print and online comics.- Nate Piekos :...
's "DigitalStrip.ttf" and "AnimeAce.ttf" fonts, which make no other distinction between lower- and uppercase letters.
Substance of balloons
In several occasions, comics artists have used balloons (or similar narrative devices) as if they have true substance, usually for humorous purposes. In PeanutsPeanuts
Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward...
, for example, the notes played by Schroeder
Schroeder (Peanuts)
Schroeder is a fictional character in the long-running comic strip Peanuts, created by Charles M. Schulz. He is distinguished by his precocious skill at playing the toy piano, as well as by his love of classical music and the composer Ludwig van Beethoven in particular...
occasionally take substance and are used in various ways, including Christmas decorations or perches for birds. Sometimes balloons can be influenced by the strip's environment: in the Italian strip Sturmtruppen
Sturmtruppen
Sturmtruppen was a successful Italian series of anti-war comic books, written and drawn by Bonvi, the artistic pseudonym of Franco Bonvicini starting as four-frame comic strips back in 1968 and evolving into fully sized collector books up to the 1990s and first decade of the third millennium.The...
they freeze and crack when the temperature is very low, or an Archie comic strip where two men from Alaska remarked on how cold it was, by saying the speech balloons froze as they said them, and the words had to be thawed out to be heard.
In the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
Who Censored Roger Rabbit? is a mystery novel written by Gary K. Wolf in 1981, later adapted into the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit .-Plot:Eddie Valiant is a hard-boiled private eye, and Roger Rabbit is a second-banana cartoon character...
, the last words of a murdered Toon (cartoon character) are found under his body in the form of a speech balloon.
Computer-generated speech balloons
Many digital artists generate speech balloons with general-purpose illustration software. Products like Comic Book CreatorComic book creator
A comic book creator is someone who creates a comic book or graphic novel.The production of a comic book by one of the major comic book companies in the U.S...
for Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, Comic Life
Comic Life
Comic Life is a comic desktop publishing computer program developed by plasq for Mac OS X and Windows. Comic Life was previously bundled with Intel Macs....
for Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
and Windows target the non-professional end of the market.
TXTual Healing is a street art performance that involves strategically projecting interactive speech bubbles onto the facade of a building, as if they are coming out of the doors and windows. Using a computer paired with a cell phone, people in the street can generate their own content for the bubbles by sending in an SMS message.
See also
- Speech scrollSpeech scrollA speech scroll, also called a banderole in Western art history, is an illustrative device used to denote speech, song, or, in rarer cases, other types of sound....
- Balloon helpBalloon helpBalloon help was a help system introduced by Apple Computer in their 1991 release of System 7.0. The name referred to the way the help text was displayed, in "balloons", like those containing the words in a comic strip...
- Image macroImage macroIn Internet culture, an image macro is a picture captioned with superimposed text for humorous effect.-Internet forums:On Internet forums and imageboards, image macros are used to emphasize a certain phrase by superimposing it over a related picture.-Formats:Although they come in many forms, the...
- LolcatLolcatA lolcat is an image combining a photograph of a cat with text intended to contribute humour. The text is often idiosyncratic and grammatically incorrect, and its use in this way is known as "lolspeak" or "kitty pidgin"....
- The Bubble ProjectThe Bubble ProjectThe Bubble Project, as proclaimed by its manifesto, aims to counteract corporate marketing and advertisement messages in public spaces.The project was conceived by Ji Lee, an artist and art director who originally printed 15,000 stickers that look like speech bubbles used in comic strips...
- Photoonica