Speech Bubbles, Storytelling, and You
Some junk on how I do speech in my comics. This is kind of a work in progress, just the very basics here, more complicated stuff to come. Let me know if you think these are good/helpful, or if you think i’ve skipped over something important.
Part 1: What are they for?
Obviously if you’re reading this you know what a speech bubble is. It’s that weird thing that comics put their dialogue in. Pretty much all comics have them, excepting those without any dialogue.
There are a lot of different ways of drawing speech bubbles, but I’m not concerned with that here. We’re focused on how to use them, not the cosmetics. I like sort of rounder bubbles with long, curvy tails, but that’s a purely preferential thing.
Anyway here is a bubble with the parts labeled.
Pretty simple, huh? Basically it’s just the dialogue itself, a bubble to contain it, the tail, which points to the speaker, and a little breathing room around the text itself.
This is important, make sure your dialogue has some space between the text and the outside of the bubble, otherwise it will look crowded and hard to read. Readability should be your biggest concern here. An illegible speech bubble is a sad speech bubble.
The only other tricky part is the tail, it should generally be pointed at the mouth of the character who is speaking. If their mouth isn’t visible it should point roughly to where the mouth should be. If the tail is pointed somewhere else it will give the impression that the sound is coming from some other part of the body.
Additionally some comics contain other types of speech other than dialogue, such as narration or a character’s thoughts. Before you start your story you’ll want to decide if you’re going to use them at all and if so, how much. Personally I prefer to avoid narration and thought bubbles in most cases, but I’ll get into why next time. For now, just make sure if you’re going to have narration or show a character’s internal monologue make sure it is visually different from your dialogue bubbles. Put that text is a rectangular box, or no container at all.
Of course putting the thoughts in a banner or directly in the panel with no container only works if you don’t also have narration and there is only one ‘viewpoint’ character whose thoughts the reader can see. If you’re going to have both narration and thought bubbles, or thoughts of multiple characters use one of these guys:
Instead of a tail you have a series of smaller bubbles pointing to the character. The same rules for a dialogue tail apply, only you generally want it pointed to the brain rather than the mouth. Cause, you know, we make mostly noises with our mouths and thinkings with our brains.
Like I said I don’t care for using thought bubbles much personally, we’ll go into that next time with Part 2: What do I put into these dang bubbles anyways?
