Speech balloons (also speech bubbles or word balloons) are a graphic convention used in comic books, strips, and cartoons 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

Labels that reveal what a pictured figure is speaking have appeared in Western graphic art since at least the 13th century. More recognizably modern "speech balloons" begin appearing in 17th century printed broadsides. With the development of the comic book industry in the 20th century, the appearance of speech balloons has become increasingly standardized, though the formal conventions that have evolved in different cultures (US as opposed to Japan, for example), can be quite distinct.

In older comics, word ballons were less common. Particularly in adventure comics, such as Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Hal Foster's Prince Valiant and Tarzan, which instead told the story largely by captions. In Europe, word ballons were also for a long time less common than in USA, or used simultaneously with captions. One example is Marten Toonder's Tom Puss, where the literary captions are printed out below the strip and almost takes up as much space as the drawings, thus making the strip take up twice the space as a common newspaper strip.

Popular forms

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 coming out of it.

An off-panel character (the comic book equivalent of being "off screen") has several options, some of them rather unconventional. The first is just a standard speech bubble with the tail pointing to the side of the panel that the speaker is closest to. The second option, which is currently only used in manga, has the tail pointing into the bubble, instead of out. The third option appears to be the creation of graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi (author of Persepolis), and replaces the tail with a sort of bottleneck that connects with the side of the panel.

Thought bubbles

Thought bubbles come in two forms: the "fuzzy" bubble and the chain thought bubble.

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.

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.

Other forms

• Scream bubbles have a spiny "exploding" outline, often a flash-like "tail point" and usually contains bold large lettering. They indicate that the speaker is screaming.
• Whisper bubbles have a dashed outline, and usually contains small dim lettering. They indicate that the speaker is whispering.
• Icicle bubbles have large "icicles" dropping from them. They indicate that the speaker is "ice cold" towards someone or something.

Text boxes

Text boxes are generally used for narration purposes. They are generally square and connected to 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

Yellow Kid's words appear on his shirt

Some characters and strips use highly unconventional methods of communication. Perhaps the most notable is the Yellow Kid, a cartoon referred to by many as "the World's first regularly reoccurring 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. In Asterix, Goscinny and Uderzo use bubbles without tails to indicate a distant or unseen speaker.

A similar tactic is used in the reoccuring "Monroe" comic strip in MAD Magazine, in which certain words are written larger or in unusual fonts for emphasis.

An early pioneer in experimenting with many different types of speech ballons and lettering for different types of speech was Walt Kelly, in his Pogo strip.

In manga, there is a tendency to include the speech necessary for the storyline in balloons, while small scribbles outside the balloons add ironic comments.

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 English, 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.

Fonts

The cartoonist may or may not draw in all the individual letters in the balloons by hand. An alternative is to use a computer, a technique universal in translated manga. Either way, the font style used is almost an industry wide constant: all capitals (the "c" in a last name starting with "Mc" being a potential exception) in a rounded typeface similar to Comic Sans.

External links

• Evolution of Speechballoons (http://bugpowder.com/andy/e.speechballoons.evolution.html)

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