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Saturday 27 April 2013

Speech bubbles!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_balloon

It didn't occur to me at the time of designing my first comic, but I realized I wasn't sure on how best to portray someone speaking from off-screen. Usually internal narration, or narration performed by someone not portrayed within the comic panels, is done via a rectangle shaped box at the top of the relevant panel. I wasn't sure if this was the case when the narration is done by someone who was speaking in the preceeding panel.

From the wikipedia page:

"An off-panel character (the comic book equivalent of being "off screen") 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. (This tail is still pointing towards the speaker.) 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 graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi (author of Persepolis).

In American comics, a bubble without a tail means that the speaker is not merely outside the reader's field of view but invisible to the viewpoint character, often as an unspecified member of a crowd."

 I decided the best way to portray off-panel speech in my comic would be, in this case, to have a standard speech bubble with a tail pointing toward the speaking character in his previous panel, as he was visible to the character portrayed in the current panel.


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