Lets talk about word balloons…

The most common way to make them in webcomics is to reduce your finished art to it’s display size. Then you grab one of Blambot’s free fonts (90% of the time it’s “digital strip”) and type onto the image. Once you position your text, you outline it with the elliptical marquee tool, fill it in with white, and then use the stroke function to make the black outline.

It’s quick. It’s easy. It’s the most common method used today, even in professional comics. It looks like an afterthought instead of an integral part of the comic page.

I bring this up because I’ve been making my balloons by hand. As if you couldn’t tell. It’s hard to do it that way because you need to either draw the letters yourself (Lettering is a very difficult skill to master, and I’m still pretty bad at it) and then put the balloons around that. Or you need to be able to properly estimate how much space your dialog needs before drawing the balloons into the art. I’m pretty bad at that as well.

Throughout the first three chapters, I’ve gone back and forth between laying out the balloons in the computer, and drawing them on the paper. While I think drawing them on the paper looks best, I’m constantly misjudging the space needed for the dialog I wrote for them. Too much space. Not enough. Never just right. All in all it occasionally forces me to rewrite the dialog to fit the balloon. Which you may not think is bad, but it is. I have to change the character’s “voice”. Victoria is supposed to be this over enthusiastic fourteen your old boy in a super woman body. She needs dialog to match that. If I have to expand what she says, her voice changes from “Victoria” to become “Bill making stuff up”.

Not that I’m saying I’m good at character voice to begin with since my writing is very plot-oriented and the characters are there to serve the needs of that plot. But it’s one of those things I try to keep in mind when I create.

That’s why I did a few pages like you see up above. I don’t know the proper term for having characters speak in symbols. Symbolese? But besides thinking it’s a clever way to do exposition without having exposition, it’s also a great way to not have to make proper word balloons.

Of course, if none of you reading this understood the conversation, then I’m a dummy for even trying and I should just go back to using the marquee tool.