Speech balloon
Speech balloons are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic books, comics, and cartoons to allow words to be understood as representing a character's speech or thoughts. A formal distinction is often made between the balloon that indicates speech and the one that indicates thoughts; the balloon that conveys thoughts is often referred to as a thought bubble or conversation cloud.
History
One of the earliest antecedents to the modern speech bubble was the "speech scroll", a wispy line that connected first-person speech to the mouth of the speaker in Mesoamerican art between 600 and 900 CE.Earlier, paintings, depicting stories in subsequent frames, using descriptive text resembling bubbles-text, were used in murals, one such example written in Greek, dating to the 2nd century, found in Capitolias, today in Jordan.
In Western graphic art, labels that reveal what a pictured figure is saying have appeared since at least the 13th century. These were in common European use by the early 16th century. Word balloons began appearing in 18th-century printed broadsides, and political cartoons from the American Revolution often used themas did cartoonist James Gillray in Britain. They later became disused, but by 1904 had regained their popularity, although they were still considered novel enough to require explanation. With the development of the comics industry during the 20th century, the appearance of speech balloons has become increasingly standardized, though the formal conventions that have evolved in different cultures can be quite distinct.
Image:Ograbme.jpg|thumb|In this political cartoon opposing the Embargo Act of 1807, the form and function of speech balloons is already similar to their modern use.
In the UK in 1825 The Glasgow Looking Glass, regarded as the world's first comics magazine, was created by English satirical cartoonist William Heath. Containing the world's first comic strip, it also made it the first to use speech bubbles.
Richard F. Outcault's 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 used presently were added almost immediately, as early as 1896. By the start of the 20th century, word balloons were ubiquitous; since that time, few American comic strips and comic books have relied on captions, notably Hal Foster's Prince Valiant and the early Tarzan comic strip during the 1930s. In Europe, where text comics were more common, the adoption of speech balloons was slower, with well-known examples being Alain Saint-Ogan's Zig et Puce, Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, and Rob-Vel's Spirou.
Speech balloons are not necessarily popular or well-known in all parts of the world. During the Gulf War, an American propaganda leaflet that used a thought bubble proved puzzling to Iraqi soldiers: according to one PSYOP specialist this was because the technique was not known in Iraq, and readers "had no idea why Saddam's head was floating in the air."
Popular forms
Speech bubbles
The most common is the speech bubble. It is used in two forms for two circumstances: an in-panel character and an off-panel character. An in-panel character uses a bubble with a pointer, termed 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 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. 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 Marjane Satrapi.
In comics, a bubble without a tail means that the speaker is not merely outside the reader's field of view, but also invisible to the viewpoint character, often as an unspecified member of a crowd.
Characters distant from the scene of the panel can still speak, in squared bubbles without a tail; this usage, equivalent to voice-over for movies, 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 marks.
Thought bubbles
Thought bubbles are used 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-like bubble containing the text of the thought, with a chain of increasingly smaller circular bubbles leading to the character. Some artists use an elliptical bubble instead of a cloud-shaped one.
Often, non-human characters such as Snoopy and Garfield "talk" using thought bubbles. They may also be used in circumstances when a character is gagged or otherwise unable to speak.
Another, less conventional thought bubble has emerged: the "fuzzy" thought bubble. Used in manga, the fuzzy bubble is roughly circular in shape, 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 near the character who is thinking.
Thought bubbles 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.
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 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 telephone, radio or television, or is robotic.
- Whisper bubbles are usually drawn with a dashed outline, smaller font or gray lettering to indicate the tone is softer, as most speech is printed in black. Another form, sometimes encountered in manga, looks like an occidental thought bubble.
- Icicle bubbles have jagged "icicles" on the lower edge, representing "cold" hostility.
- Monster bubbles have blood or slime dripping from them.
- Colored bubbles can be used to 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. Alternatively, colours can be used to provide an additional cue about who is speaking. Main characters often have individual thematic colours, and their speech bubbles are frequently tinted with their colour; especially in situations when there are not any characters visible for speech bubbles to point toward.
Captions
Artist-specific variations
Some characters and strips use unconventional methods of communication. Perhaps the most notable is the Yellow Kid, an early American comic strip character. His words would appear on his large, smock-like shirt. Shirt Tales, a short-run American animated TV series of the early 1980s used this same concept, but with changing phrases on the "T-shirts" worn by the animal-based characters, depending on the characters' thoughts.Also noteworthy are the many variations of 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, 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, for his Pogo strip. Deacon Mushrat speaks with blackletter words, P.T. Bridgeport speaks in circus posters, Sarcophagus MacAbre speaks in condolence cards, "Mr. Pig" 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 have also experimented with using different types of lettering for characters of different nationalities to indicate that they speak a different language which Asterix may not understand; Goths speak in blackletter, Greeks in angular lettering, Norse with "Nørdic åccents", Egyptians in faux hieroglyphs, etc. Another experiment with speech bubbles was exclusive to one book, Asterix and the Roman Agent. The agent in question is a vile manipulator who creates discord in a 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.
Font variation is a common tactic in comics. The Sandman series, written by Neil Gaiman and lettered by Todd Klein, features many characters whose speech bubbles are written with a font that is exclusive to them. For 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.
For Mad magazine's recurring comic strip Monroe, 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 are said in a much smaller voice. Satsuki Yotsuba in the manga series Negima is notable because she speaks almost entirely in side scribble.