LEGACY OF THE
COMIC LETTERER A Brief History of the Art of Comic Book Lettering and what you need to know to be a letterer
Amelia Hulme 1
‘Legacy of the Comic Letterer’ © Amelia Hulme Published by Whites Law 802-804 Glenhuntly Road Caulfield South VIC 3162 www.whiteslaw.com.au
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LEGACY of the
COMIC LETTERER 3
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CONTENTS
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Introduction...............................................................................................................10 A History of Comic Lettering............................................................................14 Early Years...................................................................................................... 16 The Original Process.....................................................................................18 The First ‘Comic’............................................................................................ 20 Ira Schnapp...................................................................................................... 22 Gaspar Saladino............................................................................................. 24 EC Comics.......................................................................................................... 28 digital Lettering............................................................................................ 30 Richard Starkings and ‘Comicraft’.......................................................... 32 Comic Book Grammar & Tradition.................................................................... 34 Acknowledgements.................................................................................................46 Bibliography..............................................................................................................48
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INTRODUCTION
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To the unknowing eye, the pages of a comic book may appear as though the drawing and coloring were completed at the same time. However, the finished product is the culmination of multiple artists and layers working together to create stunning comic book art. It takes at least an artist and a writer to create a compelling comic issue. The writer outlines a script that she hands off to the artist. At this point, the artist begins to draw the art directly on 11-by-17 inch pages. With just the words from the script, the artist strives to make the story come to life. A writer or editor gets final say over the preliminary sketches. Some artists draw the preliminary sketches on pages and use a projector to move the approved art to the actual comic book pages. After penciling the basic art, comic book artists then add ink. This may not be the job of the first artist, depending upon where the artist’s strengths lie. Penciling, inking and coloring may all be performed by separate artists. However, this isn’t always the case. When the sketch artist and inker are different people, the penciler may leave notes with the penciled pages to help the ink artist achieve the look that the artist intended. While ink was traditional done with a physical ink pen, computers have changed how comic books are created. Many times, the penciled art is scanned. Then, an artist digitally inks the page. Ink adds depth and texture to the pages and helps artists with their use of color. For example, shading can be achieved with dots or crosshatching in addition to coloring, which is the third step in the comic book creating process. At this point, the pages may be photocopied and resized to 66% of the original page size. The artist may provide the colorist a “color guide.” However, comic book coloring is far more involved than a color-by-number page. Colorists traditionally used markers, watercolors and dyes to achieve the desired effect. Frequently, computers replace these coloring methods. The fourth and final step is known as “lettering” in the industry. A letterer is responsible for creating and placing the comic book’s text. A letterer will use a variety of font’s, typefaces, calligraphy, letter sizing, layout, and balloon shapes to help convey the tone and impact of the writers work. A letterer is also responsible for the comic’s other wordy work, like story titles, captions, credits, and sound effects. While it’s not part of the job description, a lot of letterers will also create title treatments or logos for the comic they’re working on, as well as offering book design.
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A
HIST COMIC
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ORY
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LETTERING
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EARLY YEARS
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Lettering – adding text representing speech, thoughts, and sounds to images – is much older than the modern comic. It was an invention of political cartoons, and was a natural progression of an image’s caption moving into the image itself. It’s important to know that while lettering images is nearly three centuries old, it was not immediately the dominant form for cartoonists. The picture book method of alternating blocks of text with images remained in popular use well into the mid 1800s. The word balloon didn’t fully enter the public zeitgeist until cartoonists began using it for non-political works. Multi-panelled comic strips first appeared in the 1870s, and the general nature of the humour helped to bring word-balloons to the masses. By the turn of the century, adding text directly to images was a standard practice.
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Lettering Nibs
Before computers, there were Tsquares, Crowquill pens, the Ames lettering guide, French Curves, Ellipse templates, plunger pens and markers. And most importantly hands to use them. So here in a nutshell is the process:
The Ames Guide
T-Square 18
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Find the white space, or the non-dominant space. The letters accompany the story, they are secondary to the artwork of the panels.
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Pencil in or blue line guides with your Ames lettering guide. Set your guide to around 3-3.5 for proper line spacing. Then block in your lettering lightly in pencil or blueline lead so you can properly center your letters.
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Use your T-square to hold either your Ames or favorite triangle to use for vertical strokes if you like to. Not required, but it may speed up the process until you develop consistent vertical strokes.
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Draw your bubbles. Use your ellipse template for the main bubble and french curve for the tails to show who’s talking.
THE ORIGINAL PROCESS To avoid sharing revenue, one cartoonist would handle all the production chores, including lettering. The lack of specialization limited the types of people who took the job – it was much easier to be successful with great art and okay handwriting than vice-versa. Often, the text in the balloons was just the cartoonist’s regular handwriting, perhaps with a bit more effort toward legibility. Cursive words were just as common as printed ones, and sentence-case lettering was probably more common than using all upper-case. That changed in 1917 with the invention of the Ames Guide, a simple tool which made lettering in straight lines of even height a basic task. It’s introduction instantly made comic lettering look far more professional. Its unchanged design remained in constant use for almost seven decades before being replaced by computer technologies. There was an unintended side effect to the Ames Guide, however. Because of the extra lines a cartoonist would need to properly space the middle-height lower-case letters and any descenders (letter parts which hang below the regular baseline, like j or y), it was suddenly much more convenient for a cartoonist to use all capital letters. There are many other arguments both for and against all caps lettering (enough to fill an entire up-coming article), but this is the reason the practice became popular in the first place.
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The next big event in the history of comic lettering is only significant in hindsight – its impact wasn’t really felt until almost five years later. In 1933, the educator, entrepreneur, and printing salesman M. C. Gaines collected older comic strips and reprinted them in a free promotional booklet he called “Funnies on Parade”. This was the first comic book, and it proved popular enough to be followed in July 1934 by “Famous Funnies” #1, which sold on the newsstands for a dime. This snowballed into a new industry with an incredible need for new material. Demand quickly overwhelmed the do-it-all cartoonists, and within a few years the act of comic creation had been broken down into separate processes which were handled in an assembly-line manner. By the late 1940s, it became possible to make a living lettering comic strips and comic books for artists, studios, and companies that didn’t have the time or desire to do it in-house. The career of freelance letterer was born; and by the 1950s, letterers such as Gaspar Saladino, Sam Rosen, and Ben Oda were crafting full-time careers as letterers for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and King Features. This new area of specialization would have an immediate and lasting impact on the look and feel of comics.
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THE FIRST COMIC
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IRA SCHNAPP Of all the names in the history of comics and DC Comics in particular, the name of Ira Schnapp may be the most overlooked. Ira R. Schnapp was born October 10, 1895, in Sassow, Austria. Prior to his involvement with the comic lettering industry, he also became a master stone carver, an accomplished musician, and a superlative graphic artist. He was a designer and his touch on the DC style is incalculable. He worked on the Superman Logo, he designed most of the cover logos, and he did almost all the lettering for each cover (Schnapp designed the Comics Code Authority symbol). Schnapp also did the house ads. He was highly influential for the tone and success of the DC style for a very long time. Some of his designs were simple, yet ultimately very memorable. It was Schnapp who took two covers, put them at a slight angle, (with the bottoms turned towards each other), and added the DC Logo between them. With the addition of his distinctive lettering style, he created a unified feel for DC advertising. Ira Schnapp’s refinement of Joe Shuster’s Superman logo ran UNALTERED for over four decades, starting in September 1940 and ending in August 1983, when the logo was modified slightly for no particular reason.
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GASPAR SALADINO Gaspar Saladino has been recognized as one of the greatest letterers of all time and he has well over 3,000 issues to prove it. He was awarded the Shazam Award for Best Letterer in 1971, and 1973. Gaspar Saladino was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 1st. As a kid, Gaspar was a rabid fan of comic strips such as Secret Agent X-9 (a daily spy strip by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond that debuted on January 22, 1934). Gaspar’s love of cartooning led the youngster to enroll in Manhattan’s High School of Industrial Arts (later renamed the School of Art and Design). His career began as a letterer in 1951 when he left the fashion industry where he worked as an illustrator. He continued lettering in the comics industry at least until 2002. Gaspar did work for DC and Marvel. He is well known for his work as the “page one letterer” for many books. He did the titles, lettering, and sound effects for all DC covers during Carmine Infantino’s run as editorial director at that company. Gaspar Saladino designed the logos for the Swamp Thing, Adam Strange, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Unknown Soldier, Vigilante and the Metal Men among others. He did work in Astonish, Flash, Iron Man, Arkham Asylum, Avengers, and many, many more. He also revamped the Lantern logo to make it more fresh and current. One of the biggest things he got to work on in his career was Arkham Asylum. He created a different font for every character in the book. Only 3 creators get credit for that book-Grant Morrison for Story, Dave McKean for Art, and Gaspar Saladino for Lettering! Veteran award-winning comic book letterers Todd Klein, Tom Orzechowski, and Clem Robins all claim Saladino was the best letterer they ever saw.
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EC COMICS In the 1950s, EC Comics, famed for horror books, chose to forgo hand-lettered narration in favour of an armature system known as Leroy Lettering. It was an engineer’s solution to the need of draftsmen to produce a uniform, legible style for their blueprints and consisted of a stylus and a pantographic lettering form. From a modern perspective, where we’ve been spoiled by computer lettering with thousands of fonts able to be reproduced flawlessly, an EC comic page may not look all that special. At the time, it was actually quite gimmicky and set the publisher apart from other books on the stand. The crisp, professional letters gave the book a more mature look and (by most accounts) enhanced the horror in their stories.
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Leroy Lettering A standard Leroy lettering set consists of a set of templates, a scriber, and a set of pens. Templates are made of laminated plastic with the characters engraved in the face so that the lines serve as guide grooves for the scriber. The height of the characters, in thousandths of an inch, is given by a number on the upper right-hand side of the template. For example, 3240-500CL indicates a No. 500 template. The entire number and letter designation identifies the template in the manufacturer’s catalog. The range of character heights offered by a standard set of templates is from 80 (0.08 in. or 5/64 in.) to 500 (0.5 in. or 1/2 in.). The scale at the bottom of each template has the zero in the center and is arranged for proper spacing in relation to character heights. The distance between each scale division represents the center-to-center distance of normal-width letters. A standard set of pens for producing various line weights consists of 11 sizes ranging from 000, the finest, to 8. Each pen is composed of two parts: the ink reservoir and the cleaning pin. The reservoir is a series of connected tubes of decreasing diameters, the smallest establishing line thickness. The cleaning pin acts as a valve, protruding beyond the edge of the bottom tube when the pen is not touching the drawing surface. In this position, no ink flows. When the pen is resting on a drawing surface, the cleaning pin is pushed up, allowing a flow of ink. Action of the pin in the tube minimizes ink clogging.
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DIGITAL LETTERING
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When the desktop computer was introduced in the 1980’s, like everything else, lettering evolved. One of the early adopters of computer-assisted lettering was writer/artist John Byrne, who made fonts from existing lettering, including Dave Gibbons, and Jack Morelli. Computer lettering really started to make a larger impact with the introduction of the first commercial comic book font, Whizbang, created by Studio Daedalus around 1990. Though this was not the first instance of commercial computer lettering in comics; several independent letterers had been creating their own comic fonts since the late 1980’s. When computer lettering first started there was a modicum of the classic lettering style still involved. Lettering work was being printed out and pasted onto the original artwork. But after a few years, when comics colouring also moved to desktop publishing, digital lettering files began to be used in a more effective way by combining them directly with digital art files, eliminating the physical paste-up stage altogether. Wildstorm Comics was ahead of the curve, Marvel came around a few years later, and DC held to traditional production methods the longest, but now nearly all lettering is digitally applied. In the early years of the 21st century, the Big 2 moved almost exclusively to inhouse computer lettering, effectively ending the era of the freelance letterer. Chris Eliopoulos designed the fonts for Marvel’s in-house lettering unit, and Ken Lopez did the same at DC. There was one unexpected downside to digital lettering: the proofreading process deteriorated fast. Where scripts had once been reviewed a minimum of three times by editors and their assistants, they were now being checked only once after being lettered – by the writer. This culminated in an infamous incident with “Wolverine” #131 in November 1998 when the word “killer” was accidentally rendered as “kike” by a young Comicraft letterer who didn’t realize the word was a racial slur. The issue was released before a quick recall and a corrected reprint. Creating a font on a computer also requires the letterer to consider things which are done unconsciously by hand. The first step to designing a font is obviously to create the individual letters. Then you scan them, make a few adjustments, and you’re ready to go, right? Nope. Kerning is the important but invisible process of telling the computer how far apart the letters should be. For some letters, this is a no brainer. For others… there are some hard decisions to be made.
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RICHARD STARKINGS In 1989, veteran letterer for Marvel UK Richard Starkings decided to move to America in search of a fresh start. He arrived in New York with intentions to stay only a few weeks on a friend’s couch. While there, a Marvel US editor he knew offered him some lettering work. The assignments kept coming, leading him to put off his further travel plans and obtain more permanent housing. At first, he was intimidated by the American work pace – he was regularly expected to pick up between fourteen and twenty pages at 6pm and have them completed and returned by noon the next day. The rate did not allow him to produce high quality work, which he found frustrating. He began taking short cuts, such as using oval stencils to make balloons quickly, despite having made vows to himself earlier that he would never do so. About a year later, he decided living so close to the Marvel offices was a problem. He moved to Los Angeles and found a job at a company called Graphitti Designs. Two important things happened to him there: he learned how to use a Macintosh computer, and he lived with a roommate who had a carpentering business called “Proudcraft.” At this time, he was still doing occasional work for Marvel and Vertigo. He encountered by chance some of Bryne’s digital lettering in an issue of “Namor” and knew it was the future. Starkings met Bryne at the next SDCC show and asked him some technical questions about how to get started with computer lettering. With the help of Marc Siry, Starkings learned to use the necessary software. Over the course of another year, Starkings worked to persuade Greg Wright, the Marvel editor who had been loading him with work in New York, to let him try computer lettering. He finally received permission for the “Punisher / Wolverine” one-shot, but Starkings was still required to print off his letters and paste them onto the art the same way hand letterers did. It wasn’t until the advent of digital colouring a few years later when the industry took full advantage of the digital aspect and applied the letters to art files.
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AND “COMICRAFT” As work accumulated, Starkings was unable to handle his workload alone. At first, he hired assistants to take care of the basic parts of production – typing the script, cutting out the words after they were printed, and running finished work to the FedEx office. Soon, volume rose to a point where he couldn’t do all the design work himself anymore. The first additional letterer to his studio was John “JG” Roshell, who had just graduated with a bachelors degree in design from UCLA. JG hadn’t intended to get into comic work, but it paid the bills while he “pursued dreams of rock guitar stardom.” Part of being the assistant meant he had to answer the phones. When he asked Starkings how he should do so, Starkings remembered his old roommate’s business and said “Comicraft.” This was in 1992, and the start of the digital revolution probably would have been a big topic among comic fans if it weren’t for another huge development at virtually the same time: the founding of Image. While Image likely stole some of their spotlight, Comicraft could not have asked for better timing. In an effort to put out the best possible comic books, Image was offering better page rates to experienced letterers. This created a vacuum of sorts at DC and Marvel, where editors found themselves scrabbling for letterers who could make the books look nice and process them at a higher volume than ever before. Marvel’s “Sleepwalker” and “Hellstrom” were the first issues to carry the Comicraft name. Eisners and awards from Wizard and the CBBG soon followed, and the digital age had arrived.
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&
COMIC
grammar 34
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BOOK
tradition 35
Bold
There’s almost no plain bold in comics dialogue. Typically, bold/italic is used when emphasis is placed on a word. Occasionally you may use a non-traditional dialogue font that will actually work better with plain bold. This most often comes up with indie/underground books with their own very specific look and feel.
Lowercase
Barring the trend in Marvel comics to use sentencecase fonts on some books, lowercase generally reserved for non-verbal vocalizations like “Uh”, “Heh”, “Umm”, etc. A rule of thumb is that any vocalization that isn’t a real word, and is actually more like a noise, should be lowercase. Italicizing in this instance is optional but unnecessary. Occasionally you may see lowercase used as a visual cue indicating someone is whispering
Crossbar ‘I’
This is probably the biggest mistake seen amongst amateur letterers. An “I” with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, “I.” The only other allowable use of the “crossbar I” is in acronyms (like, F.B.I). Any other instance of the letter should just be the vertical stroke version. You will also occasionally see the “crossbar I” used as the first letter of someone’s name.
GRAMMAR
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Italic
The use of italics is quite varied: Italic dialogue is used for internal monologues, traditional-style locator & time captions, editorial captions, in thought balloons, for words that are in a language other than English, or for any instance where a voice is being transmitted through a TV, radio, communicator, as in a radio balloon. Occaisionally, you’ll see italics used for non-verbal words like “Uh,” or “Huh”, or in conjunction with someone who is whispering. Italics are also used for non-English words and the titles of movies, books, etc.
PUNCTUATION
The ellipsis is used when a character’s speech trails off. If a character is speaking, trails off, and then resumes in another balloon, you should always end the first dialogue with an ellipsis and then begin the second dialogue with an ellipsis. Another allowable use is when a character’s speech is stilted or they pause due to physical distress. Injured characters or those soon-to-be unconscious often make good use of this in wavy balloons. There are only THREE periods in an ellipsis. Again, you’d be surprised how often you see four or more.
Ellipses
There is no Em or En dash in comics. It’s always a double dash and it’s only used when a character’s speech is interrupted. The double dash and the ellipsis are not interchangeable, even though many writers use them interchangeably. For the record, there are only TWO dashes in a double dash. It sounds like common sense, but you’d be surprised.
Double Dash
There’s no set rule on hyphenating a long word to make it fit a balloon, but it’s generally accepted that you should avoid it if at all possible, and even then, only if it’s a compound word that breaks well.
Hyphenating
An asterisk appearing in dialogue references an editor’s note; a caption somewhere else in the panel or on the page. These generally inform the reader that more information can be found in a separate issue or comic book, or explain an acronym.
Asterisk
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Quotation Marks
Quotation marks are used for spoken captions when a character is speaking off-camera. In the event that there is more than one caption in the series, you should begin each caption with an open quote, but ONLY use the end quote on the final caption in the series. If two or more characters have spoken captions, end quotes should appear as each speaker finishes/before the next one begins. Punctuation on the last line of a quote should always appear before the closing quotation mark. Some editors ask that an end quote be used at the end of a page even if the captions resume on the following page.
Breath Marks
Also called “cat’s whiskers”, “fireflies” or “crow’s feet”, breath marks are usually three little dashes stacked vertically that come before and after some sort of cough or sputter. The word with the breath marks around it may be italicized, lowercase or bold. There seems to be no hard and fast rule for these. I generally italicize and if the coughing gets really bad, I use bold. If you use an opening and closing set with no word in between, you get a symbol that looks like a tiny bursting bubble that indicates death or unconsciousness of a character. This is often used to end the text in a wavy balloon.
Question Mark/ Exclamation Point Combo
This should only be used for a shouted question. It’s a loose rule that the question mark should come first. Marvel insists on it, and I agree, since the text is probably already bold or enlarged (indicating shouting) so the only visual clue a reader has that it’s also a question, is the question mark -- giving it priority.
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PUNCTUATION
Spaces
You no longer need two spaces after the end punctuation of a sentence. One space is sufficient. There should also be no space before or after an ellipsis or double dash.
SPECIAL CHARACTERS
A lone music note generally denotes whistling. You often see one or two music notes in a dialogue balloon, which indicates singing. Sung dialogue is often italic and follows a wavy baseline.
Music Notes
Numbers in dialogue should be spelled out unless they’re a date, designation, part of a name or a large number. A good rule of thumb is that any number over twenty can be numeric.
Numbers
There are five types of captions in comics: Location & Time, Internal Monologue, Spoken, and Editorial. Location & Time captions can be in the same font as your dialogue only inside a caption box and italicized. Alternately they can be blocky, sans-serif fonts to indicate locations and time stamps. In many cases these are italicized and can be lowercase as well as having drop caps or outlines. Internal Monologue captions, largely replacing thought balloons, are the inner voice of a character. These are typically italicized. Spoken Captions are the vocalized speech of a character that is off camera. These are not italicized but make special use of quotation marks. Finally, Editorial captions feature the voice of the writer or editor and are also italicized.
Captions
Drop caps are an enlarged or embelished first letter in a caption. They come in a wide variety of styles and sizes, and are most often a stylistic choice by the letterer. Sometimes they begin every inner monologue caption, or just the location/time captions.
Drop Caps
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Joint Balloons
Balloons directly joined together are generally of the same thought process. Two or more expressions that are of the same topic should be executed this way. This rule is most often broken when space constraints don’t permit it and you have to use a connector.
Balloons w. Connectors
There are two instances where this is used. The first is when a character says two separate ideas expressed one after the other. The second instance is when two characters are speaking in a panel and the conversation goes back and forth between them. Their balloons will be staggered and joined with connectors. This rule is most often broken when space constraints don’t permit it and you have to join the balloons directly.
Burst Balloons
Burst Balloons are used when someone is screaming their dialogue. They tend to be more irregular and chaotic than the radio balloon, perhaps with a heavier stroke. Burst balloon dialogue is often bold with certain words enlarged or underlined for even more emphasis. A less punchy variation on the burst balloon is a regular balloon with a small burst where the tail meets the balloon.
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WORD BALLOONS
Balloon Tails
If at all possible, a balloon tail should point to a character’s mouth as if an invisible line continued on past the end of the tail to their face. Pointing it in the general area of the character, (their hand, leg, etc.,) should be avoided if possible. A tail should terminate at roughly 50-60% of the distance between the balloon and the character’s head.
WORD BALLOONS
Double outline balloons serve the same purpose as a burst balloon - to add emphasis to dialogue. The tail of a double outline balloon can connect to either the inner or outer balloon and the background balloon usually sports a color fill or a heavier stroke. Variations are numerous and up to the letterer.
Double Outline Balloons
These are also called, “electric balloons”. Whenever speech is transmitted through a radio, TV, telephone, or any type of speaker, it is italicized and in a radio balloon. The most common version is a uniformly spiky balloon with a lightning bolt tail to the source. Over the decades, letterers have introduced other types of balloons have started to become commonplace (see examples) probably to differentiate between a radio balloon and a burst balloon.
Radio Balloons
When a character is speaking telepathically the dialogue may be italicized. Old-school telepathy balloons look like a thought balloon except they have breath marks on opposing corners. These days, many letterers opt to abandon the traditional style and get creative with these.
Telepathic Balloons
Thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years in preference for internal monologue captions. Text in a thought balloon can be italicized. The tail on a thought balloon is made up of smaller bubbles and should point towards a character’s head (not mouth, as in standard balloon tails). Generally you should have at least three little bubbles of decreasing size that reach toward the character.
Thought Balloons 41
Rough Balloons
Most often used for the dialogue of monsters, and in conjunction with monsterous fonts for a creepy or distorted voice.
Whispering
Traditionally, whispered dialogue is indicated by a balloon with a dashed stroke. More recently accepted options are a balloon and dialogue in a muted tone (grayed-out), or with a lowercase font in conjunction with small dialogue/ big balloon. Italics are a possibility as well.
Small Dialogue Big Balloon
A reduced font size is used when a character mutters something, says something to him/herself, or speaks sheepishly. Often you’ll see a lot of space left in the balloon. This is sometimes used for whispering.
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WORD BALLOONS
Wavy Balloons
Also called “weak balloons”, this is used when a character is in physical distress. Dialogue is usually stilted and broken by ellipses and the balloon and tail are shaky. As a character descends into death or unconsciousness, their dialogue may get smaller and smaller and end with a double set of breath marks.
BALLOON PLACEMENT
This is also called “Anchoring”, “Top-lining” or “Sidelining”. This is the best weapon in your arsenal to combat space restraints. Essentially, some part of a balloon is cropped flat and placed against the border. Useful when a writer has given you the Gettysburg Address and the artist has given you a thimble to fit it in. Left aligning, centering or right aligning the text against a border is a great visual change of pace in any book.
Butting Borders
Similar to butting borders, this stylistic choice consists of the white interior of a balloon breaking into the white of the panel gutters. This is determined completely by preference but seems to be more prevalent in hand lettering. I suspect this is because doing it digitally generally adds an extra few steps that can take time to do properly and cleanly. But remember: If the gutters in a book aren’t white, you may run into the problem of not being consistent throughout.
Breaking Borders
Overlapping a balloon over a border tends to look a little amateurish, but can be necessary due to space constraints. If at all possible, you’re better off butting balloons to a border. If you really have to overlap a border, continue to do it throughout the book as a stylistic choice or it’ll really stand out.
Overlapping Borders
When a character speaks from “off-camera”, the tail of the balloon generally butts against the panel border. Some editors prefer to simply have a tailless balloon. These balloon tails can be a plain arc shape, or an S-shape.
Off-Panel Dialogue 43
Foreign Languages
When a character speaks in a foreign language, each block of dialogue is begun with a “less than” symbol and ended with a “greater than” symbol. Often, the first appearance of the language will also end with an asterisk to denote an Editorial Caption that explains what language this is being translated from.
Sound Effects Punctuation
In general, sound effects lack punctuation with the exception of when you intend to seem cartoony or over the top. SFX punctuation may seem trite these days because designers in mainstream media often try to invoke a “comic book feel” with graphics campaigns using affected sound effects.
Hollow Sound Effects
A relatively recent trend in sound effects - hollow sound effects have an outline, but the center is see-through, so that focal art can still be seen. This is most often reserved for instances when space constraints, or need for impact demand it.
Special BALLOONS
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Emanating Dialogue
When a character is speaking off-camera, from behind a door or from inside a building, for instance, the tail of their balloon terminates at the point of origin and has a small, multi-pointed burst at the end of it. Letterers often take creative license with the burst, sometimes giving it curves, making an irregular star shape, or even using something that resembles a pair of breath marks.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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thanks go to laura Hudson, Laura Todd, Raffael Purcell and Aurelie Maron for constructive feedback and assistance with proofreading Thanks go to Laura Hudson for collaborative work on the body font 47
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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