Talk:Speech balloon/Archive 1

Archive 1

Marvel comics - characters speaking in other languages

I seem to remember that Marvel comics had a way of indicating that a character was speaking in a language other than English. Maybe there were brackets around the text of something like that. Anyone know what I'm talking about? ike9898 14:16, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

• <Yes. They used these things.> - <Litefantastic 16:52, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)>

I think it was copied by a lot of other cartoonists after that, because it was quite visual and easy to interpret. Who invented it, by the way? When was it first to be seen? I think I read it in Marvel comics from the 80's/90's...

I don't know. I remember them being used on the Isralis in Y: The Last Man -Litefantastic 23:49, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I though maybe you would see them in Fantastic Four comics when those green alien guys talker (Kree? Krull? I can't remember their name). Maybe check the first appearance of those guys; that might be as early as the late 60's. ike9898 00:41, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

• The Asterix comics, OTOH, used different fonts for different languages. Goth was indicated by a "black letter" font. Greek had a more angular font than normal. Norse used Nørdic åccents on the characters. Egyptian was in faux hieroglyphics. The Gauls could understand Greek but not the other languages. — JIP | Talk 14:57, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Maybe this could be added to the section of different letterings, with Walt Kelly etc. I remember this clearly, now.

Tail direction

The second option, which is currently only used in manga, has the tail pointing into the bubble, instead of out. (This tail is still pointing towards the speaker.)

Here's the example illustration, the middle drawing being the manga style:

File:Combubble speech offscreen.PNG

I don't read manga, so I don't know the conventions. But this illustration appears to mean that the speaker is off the right side of the frame. If that's so, then isn't the tail pointing away from the speaker? (After all, it is pointing into the bubble.) I think some rewording is necessary by someone who is familiar with manga. —Bkell 18:58, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

No, the speaker is on the left side of the balloon. I think it's a weird usage, though, and I don'treally understand the point of it...

Okay, well, if the speaker is to the left, perhaps the image should be edited. The other two speech bubbles indicate speakers to the right of the frame. —Bkell 02:39, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Maybe there could be added some generic cartoon faces to the image: ( '_' )

As far as I've seen, the inwards tail is actually used when an outwards tail would obstruct other balloons or art, and only rarely for off-panel speekers. It's common when a character on the far edge of a wide panel has a balloon on the other end. A more regular convention, at least in the manga I've read, for off-panel is an initial or sketch of a face to indicate who's talking, and no tail.

The "manga bubble" is not a convention in manga. I read a lot of manga and I have seen a lot of different kinds of bubbles, but I have never seen this one. I suspect that it is only used by a certain artist, or maybe even a few artists, but not a convention used in manga as a whole. In any case, it should not be discussed as a "manga bubble" as opposed to "western bubbles", since the "western bubbles" are the most common kind in both western comics and manga. However, it might be interesting to note that manga often use split tails pointing towards the speaker, something which I don't think I have seen in Western comics.

Various points

1.Gives too much weight to a style of speech balloon which is seemingly exclusively used in a single GN (certainly, if all the speech in the comic in question is like that, that's true, but not noteworthy. It's been used for donkey's years elsewhere to signify someone speaking from off-panel).

Maybe it could be added "for instance, used in Persepolis"81.232.72.148 23:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

2.Speaking of which, the manga balloon is backwards in the picture.

Yes...81.232.72.148 23:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

3.Caption boxes "are usually connected to the edge of the panel"? Only artist I've ever seen that happen with is Walt Simonson's art, where he prefers to alter the edge of the panel shape, especially when working with John Workman, Jr.. The first box in a panel is usually placed near the corner of the panel, and that's about as close as I can get to that.

Ehhh, the corner is part of the edge. I'd say upper right corner/edge is fairly common...81.232.72.148 23:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

4.Oh, and thought balloons have become very rare in US comics in recent years, with thoughts (where used) now only used as first-person narrative caption boxes.

For many more "serious" comics, yeah, but it is still one of the major traditionally used ballons, still in funnies if nothing else, your comment could be added, though...81.232.72.148 23:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

5."In a font similar to Comic Sans" - Kill It. I've never seen a single US or UK professional comic that uses any font even vaguely resembling CS, with fonts resembling specific hand letterers having become "standard" of late in US comics, apart from a few mixed-case experiments. 6.In general, the article seems to ignore the post-computer lettering explosion of the use of shapes, fonts and colours in speech balloons in US comics at least - and, indeed, the fact that since DC Comics completely ended the use of hand lettering a year or two back, with only a very few non-DCU fringe books excepted (the only one that leaps to mind offhand is Elric: The Making of a Sorceror), you'd stuggle to find hand-lettered comics in America any more. The article completely ignores this.

Holds true for the major publishers. Maybe we could make something out of this, though. This page doesn't mention much about lettering. As a sidenote, I don't like how the modern US comics are using Computer Fonts for sound effects, don't think it has the same soul as the sound effects integrated into the art from the age before computers.81.232.72.148 23:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

7.No references. 8.Neutrality - the whole thing in general seems skewed towards "independent" US comics, with manga and superhero comics only an afterthought, and UK comics not mentioned at all. - SoM 11:00, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

"Independent US comics"? I only found a brief comment about Cerebus, although many other examples neither fit among the Superhero, nor the Manga category, they are still interesting as examples on how the ballons have been used differently. What does make British comics so particularly interesting in an international medium?81.232.72.148 23:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Sign your posts with four tildes. I've noticed that we share an interest in both history and comics. In answer to your question what does make British comics so particularly interesting: Neil Gaiman and Allan Moore. Rick Norwood 16:22, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

OK. Yeah, they're good, at least what I have read, but I don't think they have done much notable experiments with word balloons... =S 81.232.72.148 23:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Check out the word balloons in Sandman. Rick Norwood 01:07, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, of course. Delirium's colorful wondering, wandering and that raven's(?) black balloons, sure, I forgot them, but they're worth noting... 81.232.72.148 14:36, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

uppercase/lowercase

In the Fonts section it says that only a few comics use upper and lowercase fonts, but hasn't Marvel Comics used these for all its books in the recent years? --Fritz S. (Talk) 22:35, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

They did for a while, supposedly an edict by former Marvel boss Bill Jemas to make the comics seem more sophisticated, but have since gone back to all caps on baloons and captions, for the ease of readability. --oknazevad 23:07, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Not quite all. Runaways and the Ultimate books are still mixed-case. - SoM 23:24, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and I have ***NEVER*** seen a professional comic lettered with a font even vaguely resembling Comic Sans, as I said above. WTH put that back in? - SoM 19:42, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with SoM. Either comics are lettered by hand or, when lettered using computer fonts, the font chosen mimics traditional hand lettering. I would therefore propose to replace the sentence: "Either way...Comic Sans" by: "In most cases, computer fonts used to letter comics are chosen to resemble traditional hand lettering". There is a simple technical reason why lower case fonts are not used in comics: this fonts have letters with 'descents' (i.e. the part of the letter below the baseline like p, q, g...) that can collide with the 'ascents' (i.e. the part of the letter above the baseline like k, h, t). Using only capital letters avoids descents, avoids collisions and saves space by reducing the line height. Lower cases are more often used in older comics, in particular in comics from the 'belgian school' such as Tintin (not only in the English translation), Black and Mortimer and others. It is rarely now rarely used for the practical reasons given above. If the group agrees I can propose an edit of the article.--Exether 23:18, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Ellipsis

The page seems to imply that the ellipsis originated in manga, which seems to be somewhat of a half-truth. At least I've seen it used a lot in old comics for musings without a clear stop, etc... I don't know if it means that the symbol has come to mean speechlessness in general, but even so, I doubt that it is an entirely Japanese innovation, even if the popularity of manga has caused it to be widespread in this particular fashion. Here's some other guy who has wondered about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ellipsis#Ellipsis_in_Japanese. 惑乱 分からん 18:33, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Order

The use of multiple bubbles on one cell should be mentioned, when there is interaction between two characters. The order of reading them may be an important aspect to include. violet/riga (t) 00:25, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You mean as in Mad Magazine movie parodies, and similar? I agree.

Reading order is important, but not universal. Generally bubbles would be read left to right, top to bottom in western culture but even that is not consistant. Many odd shaped and oriented comic book panels can become convoluted even in the best of times.--RedKnight 23:56, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

History

Actually I am not sure about if the examples of balloon-less american adventure strips I've given are general for adventure comics or not. In the case of Tarzan, at least, I guess it's because it is a literary adaptation. Most of these were created in the late 30's, when I guess the "premises and syntax" of the comics medium were already quite mature...

AFAIK, calling Yellow Kid "the world's first reoccurring comic strip" is disputed, it was a pioneering example of the medium, but mostly it was a cartoon. Also, the british comic, or (often, anyway) illustrated story "Ally Sloper" featured a reoccurring main character several decades earlier.

This example is also displayed in many Classics Illustrated issues which are generally adaptations of classic pieces of literature such as Hamlet, Invanhoe, etc. I am not sure as to why they are used.--RedKnight 23:59, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Fonts

I also think that the idea that Comic Sans is an industry-standard is ridiculous and should be taken off the page ASAP. At this site[1] there are several freeware fonts that resemble the industry standards. The problem is, I don't know what their commercial or "real" families/names are. For instance:

• Anime Ace / Digital Strip style fonts are typically used in manga translations.
• Komica Text / Mighty Zeo is similar to many mixed-case modern computer-lettered mainstream books out now, particularly Marvel's.
• For mainstream all-uppercase fonts, Alter Ego[2] (commercial) is probably among the closest I've seen to standard.

Sample images could probably easily be found/created to demonstrate, but I'm not really sure how to proceed here. Suggestions? Any professionals know the the official font families? --SevereTireDamage 10:18, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Mayan art

I don't know this information added about Mayan art. Given the sources Waffle Man has given, I'd say that it looks more like a children's picture book than a character with a speech balloon. I can't see any connection between the speaker and the text, for instance, which I think is a basic criterion for a speech balloon. I won't remove it for now, but I leave it up for discussion here... 惑乱 分からん 11:52, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree. The source is down, but the Wayback machine page doesn't seem to include any Mayan comics. - Chris 88.109.35.133 07:07, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

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Thought balloons disappearing?

I think the claim that thought balloons are disappering is too far-reaching, and the claim mainly seems to be valid for US/UK adventure comics. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:47, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

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Bidouille et Violette

Maybe this could start turning into a laundry list, but the Belgian series "Bidouille et Violette" (by Bernard Hislaire) apparently uses word balloons in a consistent manner to depict the characters' different personalities. I have the albums somewhere in my collection, but my French is rather rusty. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:04, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Mayan pot

• Picture of a Mayan painted pot A depiction of speech scrolls.

I removed this broken link. Likely it's still there somewhere on the site, but if I can't be bothered to go looking for it then neither will most readers. ;) —Tamfang (talk) 19:44, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

I haven't found a picture but references are here: http://research.famsi.org/mesobib_list.php?rowstart=0&search=speech%20scroll&author=&date_added=&publication_date=&sortby=author&num_pages=1

AJP. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.13.94.228 (talk) 18:35, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Or, equivalently, http://research.famsi.org/mesobib_list.php?search=speech%20scroll —Tamfang (talk) 05:48, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

merge Thought bubble?

Currently there is an article at Thought bubble. Change into redirect to Speech_balloon#Thought_bubbles ? --EarthFurst (talk) 08:40, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Done. —Tamfang (talk) 03:26, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Early use of speech balloon (1493)

An early use of speech balloon from 1493, can be found on the Lambiek Comiclopedia.

Early Dutch Comics (in english) and Nederlandse Stripgeschiedenis, Strips voor 1850 (in dutch)

It come from a letter written by the count of Meurs. The document is kept by the library of Zutphen, a city in the province of Gelderland in the Netherlands.

--Vincent Simar (talk) 20:49, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I think it's a phylactere, and they were fairly common in Europe. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:35, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

shiny fuzzy bubbles

... 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.

Funny, I've always seen it as representing a glow. Fuzzy animals are typically outlined by much shorter spikes. —Tamfang (talk) 18:58, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Is there an official term, or one commonly used among professionals and/or fans? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 09:37, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I have no idea what this refers to, any chance of a picture replacing a thousand words of description? 58.7.199.67 (talk) 21:11, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

I've skimmed through Love Hina and have seen exmples of this bubble. It might be common in other manga as well. In practice, it seems more similar to captions in how it's used rather as a voice-over. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:05, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Terminology again

There still seems to exist some confusion about which word to use (bubble, balloon etc), throughout the article, different words are used in the main title and in different sections of the article. Which word should be agreed on? Which word does the pros, (such as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner use?

I don't recall ever hearing (or reading) any professional use the term "bubble." It's always "balloon." This site even says, "to avoid sounding like an amateur, don’t call balloons 'bubbles.'" WaxTadpole (talk) 18:56, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

Thought bubble

I've change one of the intro lines to read "the balloon that conveys subjective thoughts is often referred to as a thought bubble", since everywhere else in the article the thought balloon is referred to as a "thought bubble", and that's my experience as its common usage. 58.7.199.67 (talk) 21:10, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

I'd say that "balloon" is more common in the texts I've read, might be a distinction between British and American usage, perhaps. I'm Swedish, myself, but I believe most of the texts I've read on the subject have been American. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:56, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Ditto. In my (considerable, but primarily American) experience, people in the business almost universally use the word "balloon." Calling them "bubbles" is usually a sign of an amateur or dilettante. WaxTadpole (talk) 20:47, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Historically, bubble is the accurate term for the shape. (A google search for "thought bubble" returns ~500K results. "Thought balloon" returns 166K) I think the common usage of balloon for thoughts is directly related to the element falling into disuse in favor of the narration box over the last decade or so, and at this point the distinction seems trivial. Argento Surfer (talk) 13:29, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't think the declining use of the thought balloon is absolute, and the thought balloon might actually be preferable to captions in certain cases. But anyway, the argument about terminology is also valid for other kinds of balloons/ bubbles. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:22, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Does it matter what people in the business actually call it? "speech bubble" returns over a million hits on google, while "speech balloon" returns between a quarter and a third of that - in wider parlance the bubble has it. Whenever I've met comics professionals we've not talked about what they call the little circles with the words in, so I can only relate what they're called in the wider (British) culture (not that I've been doing any original research).

p.s. the Leeds comic convention is called Thought Bubble 19:29, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

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tracing the history

In this 1904 book on cartooning, the speech balloon is considered a novel enough technique that it needed explaining. Is this useful information? DS (talk) 15:14, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

pictorial balloons

I've seen some funnies where the balloons contain (only) images summarizing the subject of the speech. I'd add that in the relevant place but can't recall an example. —Tamfang 00:07, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I think that's a kind of pantomime comic. I've seen several examples of that, often with rebus-like messages, by several different authours. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * 17:45, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

That is, the balloons mostly contain a mix of depicting illustrations, and widely recognized symbols, such as Z, ?, ! and ♥(heart). 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * 14:03, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Thought of an example, in Girl Genius: since Dupree's jaw was broken, she "speaks" in pictures. —Tamfang (talk) 19:14, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, yeah. It's used quite frequently and consistently, right? Maybe could be added to the article. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:00, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

You should mention the wordless balloon, that contains only a black smudge, indicating that the character is grumbling, or thinks that somebody is a jerk. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.239.87.245 (talk) 04:56, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Swear words

No mention of using symbols as swear words? Like: !#$#$&

Also, what about using different font (gothic, runes, hyeroglyphs) to convey different language like in Asterix? Svarði2 (talk) 23:46, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Callouts

Possible term to include in the article....have you ever seen this term used?

If you go into a Microsoft application such as Word and look on the Drawing toolbar under Autoshapes, there is a category of shapes named Callouts. What we are calling a thought bubble, Word calls a cloud callout.

I couldn't find any listings for this term in One Look (seaches many dictionaries simultaneously). http://www.onelook.com/ ike9898 15:39, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

• I've seen this term in Excel as well, but that's it. I think they made it up. Microsoft is big enough that it can do what it wants. -Litefantastic 15:51, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Talk Page Archives

Why can't I access the archives from the talk page? Is that a Microsoft Edge thing, or is there some error in the script programming? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:30, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

It seems the link was manually added, so I assume there could be a technical error involved. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:32, 28 March 2022 (UTC)