You’ve just written a fantastic script and absolutely cannot wait to draw it.
Then, after laborious hours and perhaps days, the artwork turns out perfectly.
You cannot wait for your readers to see it. You really can’t.
All that is left is that final, insignificant step: lettering.
You begin dropping in a few comic balloons but it doesn’t take long for the dread to start rising in your stomach.
At first, you just suspect there might not be enough room. But only five minutes later you’ve tried everything and can no longer deny it: You did not leave enough room for both script and art.
Will you make cuts into your pitch-perfect script just to uncover the art? Or will you leave in the script intact but cover up detail, action, or even significant plot-revealing aspects of the art?
There is, of course, that third, horrible option. The one we don’t talk about, much less instigate. That villain of all villains: the redraw.
In this post, I’ll share with you my tried and true method for designing comic balloons into the art from the very beginning. Follow these few simple steps and you’ll never have to face the villainous redraw again.
There is nothing insignificant about lettering your comic.
There is a reason you can win a Harvey Award or an Eisner Award for lettering a comic. Great lettering is an art form, not an accident.
In the west, we read left to right. So should your comic pages: Left to right, top to bottom. Zig zag across and down the page, just like a “real” book.
The moment your reader wonders, “Where do I go next?” you’ve lost them. It’s like seeing a boom mic in a movie shot. Illusion destroyed.
Zig Zag: Left. Right. Top. Bottom. (Click to see full sized.)
The last thing you want to do is create a powerful script and poetic art but kill any power the story might hold by making your reader aware of the reading experience.
You are Robin Hood. So aim true.
What is attached to every word balloon? A tail, right? Wrong. Well, of course, it is called a tail. But what is the tail really? It is an arrow.
And arrows point.
Yes, your tail needs to point to the mouth of the appropriate character, but that is not all. Your tails also need to point in directions that push and pull the reader throughout the page from one panel to the next in the appropriate order.
The red arrows are your road. The green arrows are the road signs. (Click to see full sized.)
Look at the sample page from my comic The Dreamer again. This time, I marked the tails of the balloons. You can see how they act as road signs, telling you when to turn, how fast to go, and if you should break. Thinking through this intentionally will add a finesse to your comic layouts, creating a consistently sophisticated reading experience that does not come by accident.
It might be perfectly clear as to who is talking whether a tail points up or down toward the mouth of a character. However, it might make quite the difference to your layout if you make the wrong choice in this matter.
In the top version the tails direct you in absurd directions that don’t make sense even though who is speaking is clear:
Top = bad. Bottom = good. Balloon tails must work in tandem with your composition.
In the second version, the tails point in a way that encourages you read through the panel, ensuring that you pass over the faces of the characters to read the expressions as well as the balloons.
BOTH tell the story.
The third balloon “-A Tory, her father is.” interrupts the previous balloon. In the second version the balloon illustrates the dialogue by turning the tail into a bold arrow, punching right into the text and forcefully creating the feeling that he has cut in while his brother is talking.
(View the final effect on the finished page of my historical fiction comic here.)
The tails on your balloons don’t just dictate order. A reader will instinctively jump from balloon to balloon.
Knowing this, you can control how much time a reader spends looking through the art in any given panel by making the right choices. Put the balloons in the wrong place, and a reader might just skip over the artwork all together.
Make sure you take the reigns and direct your readers where you want them to go so they don’t miss a thing.
Art first, Comic Balloons second, right?
As independent comic creators, we often wear more than one hat. And if the hats of both penciller and letterer befall you, you’re in luck!
Years ago, after enough frustrating “I didn’t leave enough space!” moments, I began lettering my comic in the rough stages.
Any penciller worth his salt will etch in spaces for word balloons into his layouts. But if you’re only pencilling, you still have to hand the power over to the letterer when the artwork is finished. Hopefully he sees the visual spaces you left for the word balloons, and hopefully you estimated accurately as to how much space they will take up.
But if you are both artist and letterer, nothing is left to chance. So why not change the order of your process?
When I am sketching my layouts, I make a separate layer where I mark in spaces for the word balloons. Then I do my final letters right onto my layout file.
Sketch in your comic balloons during the rough stages, and save yourself heartache later on.
If something doesn’t work at this stage, it is very easy to fix! I can re-size panels, scale figures and move objects around, all before moving onto final art.
I make sure the balloons fit in a way that they breath, make sense, read in the proper order, encourage the viewer to slow down and look at what I want them to notice within the art, and do not cover up anything essential.
With my word balloons on their own layer, I draw my final artwork. I toggle that layer on and off as I work, constantly reminding myself where they are and making tweaks as I draw, ensuring that the final page leaves nothing to accident.
Of course, if you do this right no one will ever notice.
But that is the point.
{ 105 comments… read them below or add one }
Question: So in my comic there are sometimes lengths of time that are completely silent or where I have voice-overs or captions instead of word-balloons. In that case, wouldn’t it be hard for me to lead the readers eye through the page (since these things are not exactly “arrow-shaped”)? Does anyone have any ideas about this?
WOW I’ve never thought of lettering as an art but this article sheds a wuole different light on the subject. Really well put guys.
Good article!
While I’m fairly new to the comic end of things, I’ve been an illustrator and a letterer/calligrapher for the last thirty or forty years. My work has tended to be in the commercial and entertainment industries. One of the tricks I’ve found helpful for myself and my customers to visualize or understand the needs of speech or thought balloons is to print out the desired text at the finished/print size, and preferably in the format or line construction(s) so that they can physically place the text in the desired space. If the work is drawn at 400% then the test text is set at the same percentage of the print size. All too often customers want to put the encyclopedia (massive amounts of text) into a space that might have room for ten words.
Besides the widows and orphans, you also need to consider line breaks. If single lines of text are too short, the reader loses the flow of the text. To understand this better take a normal sentence and break it up into lines of one to three words for each line. Granted, you will have times when you want a single word on a line with the rest of the sentence on the following lines, but you need to keep the flow in mind from the reader’s end of things.
I tend to do my text in Illustrator rather than in Photoshop, InDesign, etc. Illustrator makes it easy to add bubbles and tails, in fact, it’s quite easy to make brushes for tails so that you can quickly add them or tweak their shape, size, and placement to get the best results.
W-O-W consider this mind blown. This stuff is so useful.
The text and word balloons are just as important as the art, it’s a shame that whenever I have made a comic that I haphazardly slapped them on at the end. Awful! I’ve only ever used Photoshop, too, I shall have to check out this Comic Life magic!
WOW!! I’ve read billions of comics, and I’ve made several, but the ‘tails as arrows’ thing has never occurred to me!! Wow, my next comic is going to be so much better because of this.
Thank you!
Again this is very well done.
Last night I just realized something was not right with the green arrows on the left balloon on your “The Dreamer” sample.
The balloon tail is a pointer. The left balloon has the tail pointing left to right. The bottom panel (second version) follows the pointer correctly with the green arrow.
The top panel (first version) has a green arrow going from right to left against the direction the pointer is indicating.
Whether the tail is on the top or bottom of the balloon it is still pointing left to right.
I had the same question about those pesky green arrows.
You are spot on with this article. I like incorporating the lettering into the design of the page.
Wow, I am definitely late to this. But I have to say this is one of the most useful posts I have ever read on correctly placing balloons and text. I also am sorry to say I have been a felony offender in this area in the past. However, I am taking so much from this. I can’t even express how grateful I am for this post! Thanks guys!
You’re welcome, Michael! I remember the first time someone made me aware that there was more to think about when lettering than just if you spelled everything right. It was like a veil had lifted!
Just as a follow-up to last week’s topic, I just received the script I’ve been waiting for—I’m working on a Skullkickers short story! The script calls for a quaint but busy little locale, and to help me make sense of the blocking within the scene, I’m planning to make a basic model of the environment in SketchUp. Just enough of something to use as reference for angles and spatial relations.
Gonna use the “Keep It Simple, Stupid” approach so hopefully I don’t overwhelm myself with superfluous, technical junk. In regards to this week’s topic, I’ll be making extra consideration for the text and it prospective path across the page while I’m planning, since someone else entirely is handling the lettering—time to practice what I’ve been learning particularly from these last few weeks! Thanks for all the wisdom, everybody!
We’ll see how this goes! In a few months, the proof will be in the pudding!
Dude Michael!!!! Congrats!!! Let me know if you need some help with some SketchUp stuff. i got a few pointers i can hand you!!!
Awesome, Michael. Congrats. That is a great gig. Jim Zub is great.
Ooo.. I like pudding! Big Congrats Michael!
Thanks, guys!
Speaking of pointers, Derrick, would you happen to know how to how to scale a copy of a face on its original plane? i.e. to create a uniform border or frame without just drawing new edges within the plane. When I was tinkering with it this morning all that would happen was the original face would shrink in, pulling all the connected edges and points with it.
I’ve done it before without the edge-dragging, but I couldn’t get it to work this morning. Not a pressing matter, as I worked around it in the end, I’m just curious for future reference. Thanks!
Hello Michael! I may have to jump on the horn and do a screenshare with you on this but i think i should have a solution. I believe it will require grouping certain items so they act as one whole unit or using the tape measure tool to perfectly plot a new direction/shape on the specifice plane. I will email you soon!!
More Cowbell!
Actually thanks, this made perfect sense because I too was one of the artist that really considered lettering an after thought.(Wait! Until this article i still was) Let alone the psychology of the entire process. I always forget that in comics its best to be 5-star player in the game.
THIS. I am so glad you posted about this, because oh my, I’ve seen some terrible snafus in this very area. I got lucky in that when I started my webcomic with my friend, she was already a seasoned comics artist and sent me a custom-made tutorial for me to follow. One of her most important instructions was to do the lettering during layout. I can’t tell you how much that little tidbit of advice has helped me!
Thanks for bringing this to other people’s attention!
Nate Piekos has provided a great top 10 amateur lettering mistakes that is a nice companion to this article. Check it here:
http://blambot.blogspot.com/2012/06/5-and-5-more-amateur-lettering-mistakes.html
That’s great, thanks!
Very helpful article, Lora! I struggled quite a bit in the first few pages of my comic and it’s definitely something that’s very easy to overlook when you’re caught up in the development of your comic. I’ll most certainly draw from your reflections for the second volume which I currently working on, it’s great food for thought! The great advantage of working digitally is that it enables you to learn a lot just by trial and error, you sometimes need a push to engage in the necessary experimentation!
It’s so easy to make changes when working digitally. Such a time saver, and you’re right, it makes experimentation so much faster!
Even when I was still finishing my pages traditionally I was doing a lot of the layout/ setup work digitally for this reason.
YEEEESSSSSSSS! A digital conversation!! I am still learning so much about the digital approach right now so I am very stressed about it. Honestly, most likely more stressed than I need to be. I am so used to being good at illustrating with the pencil that I am concerned about not being able to just right into digital easier. I am not being patient even though I know logically there needs to be learning curve and I have just not been making time for that to happen.
I am still looking into tutorials of different ways to approach things digitally because I get so flustered with its differences. I also keep looking at all of these amazing paintings from people and I am unable to deconstruct how they made them so that I can learn from their methods and capture some into my style. I keep thinking that I am missing a piece and really, it could just be time and practice.
laziness is not a solution!
Thanks!!
Captain, here’s a thought on how to make a slow and smooth transition to digital. Think of it as feeling the water before getting it. You don’t have to swim yet, you can just sit by the pool with your feet in the water and a drink in your hand…
I draw this from my own experience and reading Lora’s post really helps me see what I was doing right and where I’m better off looking at adapting my process. For my comic, after writing the script, I storyboarded the whole thing and wrote the dialogues at the same time. This helped me break down the frames I needed at any particular moment in the story. Now this you can do digital or traditional, don’t matter, any support works just as long as it works for you. Where I see going digital as a real advantage is when I start working on the layout: I can frame my storyboard sketches just the way I want and fill blanks if I need to while figuring out where my balloons will go and how I want the page to read and adapt the pacing (I didn’t figure this out right away and my first pages illustrate how much I was struggling at first – I like to keep them like that as a reminder). Once you’ve sorted the layout of your page and you’re happy with the result you can go back to your traditional medium to render your page or even just the individual frames, scan them in and finish your layout with ballons digitally. Or, just finish your page with lettering and all on your trusted traditional medium.
This works for me so I figured it’s worth sharing, I’m looking to make this a bit more effective in the future but I totally see working digitally as a real plus while you’re still figuring your layout out as it’s just so easy to move elements about and mess around!
Thank you Wouter! Great, sound advice. I will work on what parts I can properly go digital on and what I need to stick to traditional on.
Quick question. I have been meaning to ask, but do you have an 8 page section or short story for Cpt Wayne that you would like to have published in a space themed anthology? I am running an anthology through illopond.com and I believe I still have about 2 of the 8 story spots to fill. If you would like more info or to discuss details, check the site or email me at derrickutz(at)gmail.com and I will explain things as best I can.
Thank you!!!
Hey Cap! I’ve been meaning to fid how to do those on screen tutorials. Hey Wing Leaders! Any resource for someone wanting to put together a video tutorial of their process? I’d love to share, but I’ve no idea how it’s done.
Video Tut of lettering? I could probably put one together for Comic Life easy peezy.
That’d be awesome because I got it but I’m struggling with it. I see its potential, though.
I’m looking at recording a tutorial on my digital art processes for our supper secret, most awesomers, project site that Paul Caggegi is building for us. (Cain’t wait to tell you guys more!!!) but I’ve googled desktop recorder programs and was wondering which one do you guys use, and any pointers you might have on putting together video tutorials?
Screenflow! It’s very straightforward and easy to use.
Cool Beans! Thanks Lora!
Wow!!!!!!! Whoa, what an awesome post!!!
Thank you Lora!!
Ok, this has been one of my biggest hurdles because i had always rushed to the art. I want to draw. That was/is my issues because i have been having to learn that comics are still books with words! Ha ha, i still couldnt get away from them! One of the hardest times i can remember was when i was trying to write an arguement scene in one of my first comics, CloudMakers. In my inexperience, i wanted to do one large panel, overhead shot of the charaters with alot of back and forths. By the time i was finished laying it out, it looked like they were standing in a cloud of smoke cuz there were so many bubles and NO direction to it. I neverbdid finish the page. i think i probably dropped the book about that time. I learned to major things though, i still needed to learn a great deal about writing and…i needed to stop being lazy. I realized that i was just trying to skip steps and panels by shoving them all together and it fell apart because it was a bad process.
This information is something i deffinitely want to learn more about!! Oh, also i remember that i have one of those huge Marvel how to draw the X-Men books (its 11×17″!!) And it shows how the professionals take a page of script and lay it out. Just like you Lora, all of them were spec’ing in the word ballons into the layouts and it really opened my eyes!! I will try to get some photos and link/post them to these responses.
keep’em coming, this is great!
I’ve slipped up and overcrowded larger panels with a “cloud” of dialog balloons. My intent was to make the dialog both expository and somewhat snappy, but it does usually read more as just a confusing mess. =D
I suppose the easiest way to solve that is to just break down the conversation into smaller panels, but I’m always leery of having too many “talking heads” panels in succession. During action scenes it’s easy to splice things up, but occasionally I’ll run into instances where I want characters to exchange several lines of dialog before actually recommitting to the action. Devoting a half-page, big panel to the characters having a natural, quick conversation seems like a good idea in the script, but usually ends up looking bland and overly taxing on the page.
I’m the queen of talking head pages. It’s how I made it through the DC talent search and got my gig at Vertigo awhile back.
There are DEFINITELY ways to make talking head pages exciting. And yes, to make a snappy argument I say always go for as many panels as possible! You get so many reactions and it has a quick back and forth feel.
One big large panel reads slow, like a long moment in time. The last thing you want for a scene like that.
Sounds like a topic for another blog another day.
What do you guys think about not using word balloons at all? In Two White Horses, using the classic convention seemed to spoil the mood I was going for.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dr8czJs-ok8/TmG04SwetaI/AAAAAAAACs0/LdMHQOHdt0Q/s1600/03.Two+White+Horsessmall.jpeg
I’m still not as well read Comically as I should be so I’m not aware of any examples of this being done successfully. I also chose a different font for each voice in the story. Seemed to an inexperienced newbie to be a good idea. No? Throughout, there are only three voices in the story so I didn’t think it was to confusing. Would love some thoughts from the more experienced.
It works on that page but the problem you have to remember if you eliminate balloons or boxes is that you constantly have to be planning your artwork so that the text sits on top of it and reads right.
This page is very gray so it works. But if you’re using a black line of any sort, this will be hard to pull off. A word balloon will float on top of everything and anything. If you had a style with lots of darks and lights, a white text would sometimes work, black other times, and if there were both values in a single panel, you might having problems finding anything that worked.
Does that make sense? You’d have to gray out your background to some degree to pull it off, which I’ve seen.
Not impossible, and not even wrong. But be mindful of it going in!
Yup, it was a challenge. There are pages that I had to use both black and white text. Fun challenge not a dreaded one. All in all, to my limited experience and knowledge, I think I pulled off the mood I was going for. I did a lot of experimenting on that story. Thanks Lora!
Lora I love anything that talks about the Hierarchy of the page, great post! After studying graphic design and typography for many years, it is amazing how much power the shape of a word can have, and the strength each single word can have in creating hierarchy throughout your composition.
A little tip I can pass on to make sure your paragraphs always read smoothly, is to watch out for “widows” & “orphans”
*Side note: I’m not talking about kids with no parents and men hungry women.
WIDOWS are singular words left on a line break by themselves at the end of a paragraph. They can make your paragraph look messy, so try to turn them up.
ORPHANS are little words left on the end of a line, for example “an” “a” “it” “the.”
It really neatens how your paragraph is read by simply turning them over!
Hope that helps!
Good points, Tegan! I’ve only recently become aware of the terms myself, and now that I’m familiar with them it’s easier to keep an eye out for those isolated, dangling words in my work.
It’s all composition! Whether it’s an illustration, a fine art painting, a website or a comic page.
The same rules apply in every instance. Yes, my husband is a graphic designer and he is very tuned into when I make mistakes with my text treatment. He’s really helped me be more aware of it myself.
Great stuff! I am having to remind myself of this too and just the proper structure of sentences in comic panels in the first place!
Thank you!
I totally agree Lora! I think all graphic designers have a passion for good kerning!
Great post, I learned a lot. I once read Mike Mignola say that he considers the word balloon as part of the art which is why he physically draws them in AS part of the art. I took that to heart last time I drew a comic and hand drew the balloons into the panels, just like I did when I drew comics in elementary school through high school. Funny enough, there was less to draw that way.
The tail thing is an awesome tip. Now that I know about the arrow thing, when I look at my comic and see how they don’t do that (even accidentally), makes my comic look completely rhythmless. Where did you hear about it?
Luis, I draw my balloons by hand too.
This is one area where Lora and I don’t see eye to eye. I’m not a fan of the “Comic Life” approach because it’s way too time consuming for me.
My entire process is based on making things as efficient as possible, so I prefer to just do the whole page in Photoshop without moving between programs, importing/ exporting etc. I find that when designing my balloons into the art, I want to treat them fully that way – which means I want to tweak and move them along with every other element on the page – which means I don’t like the restriction of moving over to Comic Life just to work on the word bubbles in isolation.
That said, with the Cintiq, I can draw the tails by hand VERY quickly. And I have a bunch of pre-drawn bubbles that I made into custom Photoshop brushes – so I can just “stamp” the bubbles out and then use the Transform & Warp tools to tweak them.
Am I making sense? I just woke up…
Much making sense you be doing.
Making word balloon stamps is a darn good idea I’d never thought of. That’s a good tip. But then again, I’ve never done a digital comic page yet. I still use bristol board pencil and ink. I don’t have a Cintiq at home. Besides, last time I drew and inked a comic, I did it while sitting on the couch next to my wife as we watched a movie. That would have been difficult to do with a Cintiq, unless you got a small one.
Thanks for the tip. You guys are doing a killer job with this site. Who do you follow for site creating, content and marketing?
After working in Manga Studio, I’ve considered making a few stock dialog balloon paths in Photoshop so that I can actually create “organic” looking balloons with the Shape tool on the fly, ones that can scale, squash and stretch to any size without losing their crispness. That’s pretty much what I do now, but I only use the mathematically simple inorganic shapes that come standard. They can get pretty stale.
I also tend to draw my tails with the anchor-point Pen tool, just so they’re free of unintentional hand jitters.
The one thing MS has up on PS as far as lettering goes is the ease of placing word balloons. Pick a shape, drag it to the appropriate size, then click-drag a path for the tail to follow and MS creates a tail with consistency. The balloon and the tails can be resized and repositioned together or independently—no having to redraw because the program is treating them like vectors, not rasterized bitmaps yet. It’s nice, but falls apart because the text editing is so mangled.
Great tips, thanks Michael.
Man, I have to get better at drawing solid shapes in PS. it sounds like doing the bubble and all there would be an interesting twist on my current method. Right now I paint in PS and then construct balloons and type in InDesign. Like you mentioned, just a lot of switching back and forth.
Thanks!
Aye, but you need a Cintiq to begin with
I have just checked the prices and I’d need to be a London Banker to justify to myself buying that at this moment giving that I am not a professional. It looks amazing in the youtube videos, though.
I tried to do the bubbles with a normal tablet.One of those in which the tablet is not a screen and it was an absolute disaster. Once you’ve decided where everything goes in the image you can put it with Comic life, which lets you twist around the bubbles easily and see where the arrows point better (following this post method) efficiently.
The only bad thing I see in Comic Life is that it crashes more than a bumper car. In the process of lettering a page it has crashed twice. I hope they make it better in the future. I am still with the trial copy, wondering whether it will be worth to drop those few pounds to get the full copy. I wouldn’t like to find later that there is a better program for the same price.
That’s weird. That shouldn’t be happening. I’ve been lettering my comic with Comic Life for five years and it doesn’t crash on me.
Are you on a Mac or PC?
PC, but maybe it is because of the 100 MB of the tiff original
I always save out a flat JPEG to bring into Comic Life and then delete it when I’m finished and export just the balloons to Photoshop and put those in my final PSD file. Comic Life is not as sophisticated as PS when it comes to colors, resolutions, etc. so I never export my final file right from that program. I used to but my colors would get all messed up. I wisened up pretty quickly.
I love the program because it lets you size & resize balloons and balloon tails so easily. Plus, it fits the words in there great too. When it comes to everything I talked about in this post, that program makes playing around and experimenting so easy and time efficient.
I disagree with Chris that lettering in PS would be faster for me on account of this. Despite working in 2 programs instead of one. I do a lot of playing around with how my text fits in the bubble that I didn’t mention in this post. Comic Life makes that part so easy and editable.
I think it depends also on how much dialog you have. If your scripts are light you won’t have much to worry about when it comes to fitting all your text in. But if you have a few chatty characters like I do, the stretch resize options will be a life saver.
I hope a smaller file size fixes the problem for you!
Apparently there is a maximum number of nested replies, so I have to reply to myself instead than to Lora.
I more or less followed your process when it crashed, first in JPEG (crashed) and then TIFF (worked the second time). I guess it is just less robust in PC. I also realised once it was done that it wouldn’t have mattered whether the quality was the same or each character was made out of a big fat pixel. Oh well.
I agree with you. It is done for the cartoonist in all possible sense. I wish there was a plugin like this for Photoshop. The only problem I found is that for some reason it sometimes breaks the word ‘to’ into ‘t’ and ‘o’ if it is at the end of the line before the last line, but it is enough to be careful.
I do cartoons, so chatting is everything
Thanks again for the hint. I look forward to that tutorial, especially if you have hidden tricks that are not obvious
Wah. I’ve long drawn the balloons in when doing my thumbnails, but I never realizes that about the tails. Now you have me going through my thumbnails, adjusting the tails.
I wish you had gone into more detail about how to use the bubbles to encourage reading the whole panel, since there is nothing more frustrating than spending hours getting an expression just right only to have readers skip over it. That happened to me frequently.
All in due time, Sly… …all in due time.
But I want to know nooooooooooow, Chris!
Me too!
Really great post, Lora. I’ve always made sure to include the balloon space as part of the art/layout rather than trying to find space later, but I had never thought about the direction/angle that the tails point in. What an incredible yet subtle tool!
Thanks for this – I’ll be implementing it immediately.
Anything that helps readability I think is worth mastering. The second a reader has to ask themselves where they should go next, the spell is broken.
That is death to someone being immersed in your story!!
Good article. The one thing I’d like to add is about text flow. Before you start your pencils, you should place your text over your thumbs so you can adjust the way the text flows within the bubble. That way, a reader isn’t confused by jarring breaks in phrasing while it’s being read.
It’s one thing to get it all to fit in the confines of your shape. It’s another thing to have it flow well so it makes sense when read. I’ve seen so many comics fail at this (good ones too!) by just cramming the text in the bubble to make it fit, and the reading flow is interrupted due to poorly wrapped words.
Excellent points, Drezz. Thanks so much for sharing.
This post is only the first in a whole Comic Layout Tutorial series. We have much, MUCH more to say about every aspect of page layout… Stay tuned!
It’s not always possible, but I like to try and depict the cadence of the dialog through the line breaks. But at least for me, if I have to choose between that or conforming the text to the conciseness of a neatly placed balloon, the latter usually trumps the former.
When you letter during your layouts, you can have both.
I MUST ADAPT!
It’s not hard. You’ll find that you can make improvements on your dialogue as well, by shortening or tightening up phrases. I know I’ve cut out extra ‘fluff’ from my convos and the message got across quite nicely.
I agree. I learned this very early-on. Story gets clearer and jokes get funnier when you have to tighten things up.
…and by laying out the bubbles along with the art I was able to see with even more clarity how much of my already-polished dialog and description were superfluous.
Great post Lora! Lettering is a big task for me. After reading this I totally just ignored the right to left, zig-zag rule. This will make laying out my pages a little more easier.
Jeremy – I’d love to see examples when you start producing some. And I’d love to see how you push this/ get creative with it. You’re amazing.
Happily, I’ve been using this process of lettering between art stages for a while (thanks to Lora) but just yesterday I realized I made a lettering faux pas for an upcoming update. I have an establishing shot of the Tokyo Dome…it’s a big sports arena with TOKYO DOME in big, bold, neon letters. Hard to miss, right? Except my characters dialogue covers up those big bold letters! Oops. Fixed that with the quickness.
Interesting article. I’d like to second (or perhaps third or fourth) the concept of laying out word balloons before drawing the art. On my current comic project “Icefall” I found that to be a real boon. The issue of the balloon tails adding to composition is a new one – I may have to re-examine my pages and see if I need to make changes on that front.
One thing I’m not sure on how to handle is when large amounts of information need to be dispensed. Most comics I’ve seen tend to keep sentences (and the information they contain) very simple. Which is fine until you have to convey a subject you’re 99% sure your readers know nothing about, and you can’t use sound bites.
I’ve only seen one comic attempt this and that’s “Atomic Robo”. I’ve tried to emulate Team Robo’s results in “Icefall”, but I’m still finding word balloon placement to be a problem when there’s a lot of text, even after whittling it down to the bare minimum (the current page of “Icefall” is the best example of my trouble on this front). Any additional thoughts when you have large amounts of text you can’t get rid of?
Hey, Andrew!
It seems to me you had enough room for the balloons on your page, that’s not a problem- you did a great job with that. I would note that the characters are just headshots. It seems as if there is a tense situation going on (or about to go on) according to the dialogue, and yet the dialogue and the images aren’t both “saying” the same thing. You could use other dialogue on this page and still have it work.
I think a great comic page shouldn’t work with alternate dialogue. How can you layout this page so that the images are saying what the text is saying? Cut away shots to the disaster with just a voice over as they describe what is happening? More intense expressions as they realize the dire situation they are in? Control panels blinking as things are going awry?
I’m not sure, but perhaps that gives you something else to think about on these intensely expositional pages.
(Think about the clever way that Mission Impossible solved this problem when they break into the CIA. Tom Cruise’s voice over overlays scenes of the security guard and vault on a normal day so we know what they are up against. Later, Oceans 11 copied this and did it really well, too.)
So, if I understand you right, the text is fine, the dialogue placement is fine (for the images present) but the images themselves don’t match up with what’s being discussed. Ow. Well, at least I’m learning this now rather than after the comic goes to print.
Apart from intensifying their expressions, one thing I toyed with but rejected due to time/complexity was having an image showing the picture in both Kirov’s and Teri’s minds serve as a “background” in each of those panels. Kirov’s would have been of seismograph charts and a projection of future quakes (cool, academic), while Teri’s would have been of cave-in’s and structure breaches at the base (given her more practical frame of mind).
I’ll put that down for my re-draw list when the comic is complete and I’m fixing it for print. Thanks for your thoughts
Don’t worry Andrew! I know what it’s like not to have time to do a redraw. If I could redraw my whole first volume I would!
I just mentioned it as something to keep in mind as you’re making pages going forward. It is *inevitable* that your art, layouts and storytelling will improve as your story moves ahead. Good luck!
I’ve actually been thinking about word balloons a lot lately because I seem to have hit a cache of comics on DeviantArt with people who don’t seem to understand that we read from left to right. Its astonishing how I’ll be reading the dialogue which starts reading from left to right then makes a sudden shift in the middle of the action so that the words only make sense if you read from right to left instead! All the more confusing when you see characters on the left side of a panel have a “reaction face” before the words that induce the reaction are spoke on the far right! Argh!
I think I’ve been guilty of the preemptive reaction shot a couple of times. It’s one of the easiest missteps to avoid (as it’s so fundamental to the specifics of your layout) so I’ve only fallen prone to it when I’ve felt absolutely cornered into an established layout. If I feel like I have to keep a certain character on the left for the environmental “blocking” to remain consistent, I’ll at least try to keep the dialog in question somewhere in the middle and/or slightly above the reacting character, so try in nudge it a little further up the reader’s priority scale. And I also try and make sure the reaction-causing line is the first thing in the balloon.
GREAT ARTICLE! I think lettering is the stage that takes me the longest because I fight so hard to try and get it right. I hate reading a comic with bad lettering. It just kills the whole comic. It’s such an important step.
Indeed, it almost always takes me longer than I anticipate to letter a page.
A welcome eye-opener, Lora! Great write-up!
I’ve sometimes tripped up over my own balloon layouts while reading through finished, published pages. Nothing egregious, but it’s always a bit “embarrassing.”
I don’t know that I’ve given much consideration to tail placement beyond their effect on the composition within their own panel—I’ll have to be more mindful of the whole page from here on out. That “road signs” analogy should come in real handy!
I admit that lettering is the last thing I “think of” when composing a page. I’ll rough in approximate word balloons in the roughs if I think I might have a particularly tough time fitting the script onto the actual page, but that’s always subjective and only estimation. Recently I considered blocking in text during the rough stage, but I find Manga Studio to be (ironically) bad at handling text, so it just becomes frustratingly impractical—I still just end up lettering in Photoshop. *avoids jeers and chucked beer bottles* I am trying to incorporate at least more tangible considerations for the text earlier in my process.
Something I’m big on though is tidiness of the individual word balloons, though!
I think you can actually see a pretty noticeable evolution of my word balloon presentation throughout the first four Bonnie Lass books. I now try to make sure I’ve got a minimum of about 1 to 1.5 characters’ worth of buffer space between the edges of my text and the outline of the balloons. Any closer to the edge than that and your word balloons start clashing with the surrounding art, with the text inside flirting dangerously close with the images around it. Conversely, too much empty space around the text can look wrong too, unless you’ve got a stylistic/practical reason for it.
Something else I picked up just in the last few months… Tails should taper to a point no closer than halfway to their source. Easy exceptions would be extreme close-ups, but in general things are going to look cleaner if you’re keeping your balloon tails from dangling over too much of your panel real estate.
Can’t wait to see all the responses to this article! There’s so much I could stand to learn just to be adept at lettering! (I’ll even cast a vote for future blog posts on the topic!)
Man, Michael … I’m enjoying these tidbits of text balloon wisdom you drop throughout your comments. In my current project, I’ve been thinking of finding a different style of rendering text balloons that feels more incorporate with the style of my illustrations. Anyone have any tips, warnings, ideas in that regard?
I second this open call for tips, warnings and ideas. =)
For the most part I’ve kept my lettering process pretty mechanical. I even set up an Action in Photohop that would format my entire page for me (sadly, lost the action script when I upgraded my suite) including preparing layers with Styles appropriate for composing my word balloons.
While it made for a great way to keep the pages consistent and neatly organized, the choice of how to actual create the balloons still came down to me in the end, and I always opted to just use basic ellipses, rectangles and perfectly rounded corners on my balloons. It works, but the ease with which those can be made is apparent when they’re set in place. Ideally I’d like to figure out a method by which I can keep the balloons more organic while still using a somewhat mechanical process to keep them stylistically consistent.
Great article, but like Mike Mayne, I’m using MangaStudio and its handling of text is a bit… challenging. And I’ve been roughing in my dialog/captions right after the roughing stage by writing in the text.
I have a marker pen, set to about .35mm. Then I click on the Grid layer (which all pages in MS has) then in the layer properties layer click on the Grid tab and set the grid to be .25/inch with 4 divisions. Be sure to lock the layer after making these changes, as MS will default the grid when you go back to the drawing layers. MS will also change the .25 to .252, but what’s 2/1000 of an inch between friends?
Then I create a new layer, make the layer a 2-bit black and white layer and name it something that you’ll recognize as being the container for the text placement (I do “ruff text” so it jibes with the “ruff pencils” I have). For me, this method has the advantage of allowing me a first draft of text, before typing it into Scrivener to be reviewed/edited by the spousal unit. And what Laura wrote about being able to rejigger/adjust the layout/text is a bit easier in MS, because the “ruff text” is bitmapped and much easier to move and adjust than MS’s real text.
And this blog post is a great one, Laura, because it emphasizes the importance of text and art in comics working together, which in a factory-assembly line mode gets overlooked a bit.
Mike, I’ve considered doing rough letters by hand in MS. I’ve never messed with grid layers—that might be the kicker I need to give it a go.
Thanks for chiming in with your process!
I was considering making the borders using a sketchy/inconsistent line, using opacity/layer effects in Photoshop, and adding custom brush and texture effects – pretty much painting the balloons right a long with the illustrations for a more integrated feel. I have one spread, due to the nature of the story where I’m considering drawing the balloons as 3d objects in perspective.
I’ve experimented around with more illustrative, stylized balloons before.
http://michaelmayne.deviantart.com/gallery/?q=pokemon#/d308j12
There I just used a jittery brush to stroke a filled path, which complemented the texture I used throughout the piece. Obviously it’s not really a sequential piece, but I’ve seen similar approaches used in longer-form narratives and it still felt right.
I’ve also used semi-transparent balloons (with or without a drop shadow) with varying favor. Still at 90% opacity, but the subtle colors coming from behind made for an appealing look, I thought.
There’s always room to be avant garde in comics, and I don’t think that has to stop at the lettering stage. If you can stylize your balloons in a way that feels intrinsic to your story, or even if you just want to try something different, I think readers would be happy to have a fresh (or at least rare) spin on the usual typography.
Cool. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. It will be fun to experiment with.
Cool article.
I’ll definitely put this into use.
Thank you
Lou
Glad to hear it!
I’ll have to pass this one on to my lettering guy. Good stuff!
Thanks, Jake!
I promise you this isn’t a brown nose Lora, but just the other day I was reading The Dreamer and thought to myself what a great job you do on ballon placement & smooth reading order. I wanted to share a cool effect too that I found in Jason Brubakers work.
I picked up his book Phobos at WonderCon and I Loved it!I wanted to share this cool effect in which, by his ballon placement, Jason Makes panel one, Panel 2. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5gbr9Evih1qe8aamo1_500.png
I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing this, but I was reading along and then come to this and thought, “Cool! Look what he just did!” and it wasn’t a glitch or hick up moment at all! I love it when Comic artists can pull off things like this.
Ha, that is nice! ARROW!!
Shucks, thanks for the compliment, Sam. One of the things I’ve had the most fun teaching my PW apprentices is layout. We have a lot of fun working on the layouts for The Dreamer, and then talking about all the changes I make to their designs before I draw them myself. It’s forced me to really think through WHY I’ve made the changes, which is good, because now I have words for it and can teach you guys what I’ve learned.
And we thank you for sharing. Great series of posts going.
Oh! This is just delightful. The first time I read a book on Comic Book Layout it blew my mind. I realized I had been putting the balloons in the WORST possible positions.
Going one step forward I think balloon placement has helped my art advance because I’m motivated to place a character where they will be first to speak and that forces me to layout the scene in a more dramatic way, like a camera placement in a film.
I guess that is the hardest part of lettering, when it’s amazing, you scarcely notice it.
Absolutely. I didn’t go into it here, but yes, by dropping in your word balloons so early, you can make changes there to your layouts for even more clarity. The art & balloons should work together seamlessly. That’s why I figure it all out so early.
Who is talking first, which way are they facing, and how does this control which panel you are inclined to read next are ALL controlled by layout. It’s one of my favorite subjects and I’ve just been itching to start talking about it here on Paper Wings!
This is a nice article. I never thought on how arrows can move the reader along the panels AS MUCH as balloons placement.
I had some of the problems lettering Captain Scotland (i.e. I have learnt the hard way). Pretty much in every strip (not that many so far) I have tried different methods: writing them as I pencil/ink, using the ellipse tool in photoshop/illustrator, draw them on the fly in Photoshop using a tablet, getting them done by someone else… none of them seem to be good enough. I think next time I am going to use the ellipse tool+drawing the arrow using the wacom tablet.
Also, a caveat for those doing web-comics: A friend noticed that if the text in the balloons is smaller than the text in your website it is way harder to read. I was never aware of this till he said it, but since then I have noticed it in many webcomics.
So what is the ‘right’ size? This is something hard to decide when one is working in photoshop at 2x or 5x the real size, so if you are making webcomics it is probably a good idea to ‘resize’ to final size (say 900px wide) before lettering and then adding the letters. I am not sure if this would mean rewriting everything in case you want to print the comic in a book. Any advice regarding this?
Finally if someone else letters your comic (for instance a colourer), I had an idea that I thought to be original, but later found in Peter David’s book on writing comics. Print out a copy of your pages and draw over them the balloons with a number (and maybe even the arrow, now that I know how useful they are) indicating the order in your script. Then you can scan it and send it to your letterer so that he knows where he should place the balloons.
If you set your font preferences to work in ‘points’ as opposed to ‘pixels’ you should have no problem lettering to scale on your high-res work file. Everything stays relative.
The only snag you’ll run into then is just how different typefaces compare to each other in size by default. One font’s 8-point size might feel more like another’s 12-point, etc.
Of the comic fonts I use (which tend to match up in overall character size to most common fonts), I’ve found that 6.5- to 8-point tends to come through clearly enough for legibility, even in web-resolution. That 6.5 is the absolute smallest I’ll go, though.
Wow, that’s great. I didn’t know about that. I always thought it was just like speaking in cm or inches. It solves my problem. Thanks a lot.
Jesus, if you are working on your comic pages using a consistent process, you should only have to figure this out once.
I use a font size that is perhaps a little bit larger than typical comic books. I do that because it looks fine when the graphic novel prints, but it also is perfectly readable on screen.
I’d experiment– print out your pages, but then reduce a copy to 72dpi for screen. Play around with it until you find a size that looks great both ways, and then use that every time you letter a page. You won’t be surprised by the final result, and you won’t have to rediscover a solution every time.
Just make sure your art files are always the same size and you shouldn’t have a problem.
By the way, I use a program called Comic Life to letter and love it.
Do you use Comic Life for any of the rest of the process, Lora?
Just curious. I tinkered around with it maybe once when I first got my Mac and wasn’t really compelled to stray away from my typical process at the time.
Honestly I’d completely forgotten about it till now.
Nope. Just lettering. The updates have really improved the word balloon sophistication. I don’t know what version you had.
I don’t mess with panels. I drop in a flat JPEG of my roughs, letter that, then delete the art. I export just the balloons and drop them into my file in Photoshop and there they are for the rest of the process.
It’s just so easy to size, resize, make a style and reuse it! And, it looks GREAT!
Thanks for the hints. This program seems like the holy grail of time-saving.
Does Comic Life export into photoshop format or just tiff?
Can you export all the bubbles in the page in place at the same time?
Does the exported file work ok under resize once in photoshop?
Also, I’ve seen they have two versions: 1.3.6 and 2, which one do you use?
Too many questions, maybe
It can export into TIFF, JPEG, PNG, or PDF. But it doesn’t do a .psd file.
Yes, the page exports with everything in place. I just select the white space in Photoshop and the select the inverse and drag the balloons into my art file. If you’ve made sure that your Comic Life page is set up to the same dimensions as your psd file, they’ll fall right into place!
I have the newest version, whatever it is. They update it regularly to fix bugs which is nice.
Hope that helps!
Thanks! I’ll be looking into it once I get around to lettering again!
Wow, this is a really neat article. I never thought much about the tails on my word balloons, but that is definite food for thought.
Since I do Adrastus digitally, I put the text on when I lay out my panels, usually before I even rough out any art. I catch a lot of redundant text that way and can economize my words. Then I can be absolutely, 100% sure that I don’t have to cover important parts of my art with text later on. Makes things much easier for me!
You’re right! I try to hire out as much help as I can on The Dreamer. But lettering, though I don’t *have* to do it myself takes so little time and, like you said, it’s the final script edit!
You catch all kinds of redundancies, or things you thought sounded natural that perhaps don’t when you take the script and format it in a balloon on a page. It’s the final stop and I love having the power to make changes myself up and to that point.