» The Joys Of Speech Bubbles: Lesson One (Why We Use Them)

  »  Lesson One: Why Speech Bubbles?

Speech bubbles fill two important roles in a comic. First, they give the text a nice clean place to live, separating it from the rest of the image and making it a lot easier to read. Secondly, they allow the reader to quickly and easily identify who it is that's talking. Let's look at some examples.

Okay, in this image, we can plainly see that the Angel (that's the guy on the right) is talking to the Devil. There's no speech bubble, but some would argue that it's not necessary. It's obvious. I'd probably agree with them, too. In this one instance, speech bubbles are probably not all that necessary.

And here's the same shot with a nice background. It's not fancy, nor does it detract from the text, which is still very clear. This is great when you can do what I did and chose a background that allows for the text to be clearly seen. This is the ideal bubble-free world, where only one character speaks and the background is clearly visible. However, not every comic lives in this magical land.

Uh-oh, Tony. The text is still there (squint and you can see it). But now it's become lost in a muck that is the background. Too often, you'll see a comic which has a nice simple background eventually get forced into using something more complex. The bubble-free comic cannot survive in this environment. It must adapt, or suffer.

That's better. With the addition of the speech bubble, we can clearly see that the Angel still, in fact, loves the Devil. This should demonstrate the usefulness of speech bubbles to separate the background (or, at the very least, demonstrate that I can wow and amaze even on a kinda dull topic like this).

Now for the second part of my demonstration. Here we have the Angel and the Devil, but now the Devil is finally replying. Mean Devil jerk that he is, he doesn't seem to care too much for the Angel's comment. This, again, is a perfect bubble-free world, where no one is talking too much, and the background doesn't interfere.

And now they're fighting. (Poor Angel! Poor Devil!) Here you can see some of the problems developing, as the text is all crammed together, making it more and more difficult to see exactly who is saying what. There are some tricks that can be done to help with this. Making the Devil's text Red, for example, would help, as would drawing lines to connect each line of text to the guy who said them. Both of these would suffice, but each of them has their problems. The red text would fail if the background was too light, too dark, or contained elements of red in it. The lines could become cluttered and messy (done right, the lines could work just fine, but would essentially be acting like speech-bubbles without the benefit of white-space).

Now, just for fun, let's go ahead and add in Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot seems confused by the fighting, and is asking a very natural question. While this might work for Mr. Robot, our poor panel isn't doing too well. It's getting pretty cluttered. I actually had to resize the text just to get it to all fit. Imagine what would happen if our people were arguing before a background. It has the potential to become a genuine mess. Someone who didn't get the benefit of watching this evolve might give this panel one glance and walk away sighing. We don't want to make that person sigh, do we? Of course not. Let's go ahead and try to make life easier.

That's better. They're still fighting, and Mr. Robot is still confused, but a random person trying to read the panel would not sigh, and would not walk away. That means they might actually read the next panel, if we could manage to hold their interest. Which means, potentially, we might just be gaining ourselves another fan. (Hooray!)

I hope that's helped illustrate why speech bubbles are cool. They both protect the text from complex and distracting backgrounds as well as showing exactly who is talking. Using them correctly can greatly enhance your comic. Using them poorly, like many things in life, can be worse than not using them at all. With that in mind, please stay tuned for the next lesson, titled: Speech Bubbles. Making 'Em Work.