Comics and Storytelling

Design Resource

The Grammar and Vocabulary of Comics

The linguistics of Comics

Saurabh Singanapalli

IDC, IIT Bombay

Comics and Storytelling

• The story of panels
• The development of 'speech bubbles'
• What do speech bubbles do?

Before we study how panels, icons, images and words function in comic books, let us take a quick look back at how panels were developed in the first place. The Western tradition of sequential art can be said to have developed through political cartoons in newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 18th century, William Hogarth, another English painter, used text together with his paintings to form a narrative, and the poet and painter William Blake produced many books where illustrations would appear facing printed text.

In the 19th century, while cartoons were increasing in popularity, no one had really put them together in a sequential narrative before. So there were only ‘single-panel’ cartoons with the text or narration usually printed above or below the panel. However, some of these did experiment with speech bubbles (fig. 2.1). However, using speech bubbles was definitely not the norm until much later.

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Among the examples mentioned above, Hogarth’s work is particularly important, as he wrote satirical pieces using a series of pictures put together in a style similar to modern-day comic strips. A Rake's Progress (1726) is composed of eight different canvases, each with text at the bottom, which formed a narrative when put together. His other sequential work, A Harlot’s Progess (1731), follows the same format (see 2.3 to 2.10). This is a series of paintings which were later converted to engravings (only the engravings survive today). All of this informs us that, well before the modern era of comics and graphic novels, pictures were used in combination with text to form narratives, across cultures and geographical locations. One could thus argue that William Hogarth’s work was a precursor to the ‘panels’ format that is so common to comic strips and graphic novels today.

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As in the case of writing, the advent of print helped the growth of sequential pictorial narratives (McCloud, 1993). It isn’t surprising therefore that by the early 19th century, one can see clear signs of the origins of the modern comic book and the graphic novel. As mentioned earlier, this stems from the association that comics have with cartoons, which gained prominence at around this time by their use in many publications (notably Punch) for humour and satire. However, speech bubbles (also called “text bubbles”) only became synonymous with sequential art with the advent of comic strips. In the Western tradition, R.F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid is often credited as being the first comic strip to begin using text bubbles, although some others also give credit for this to The Katzenjammer Kids by Rudolph Dirks and Harold Knerr. In fact, text bubbles did exist before Outcault, but in The Yellow Kid, he moulded them into the form that we are familiar with today. But no matter which one came first, it is only at the turn of the century that speech bubbles first began to be used regularly. As the following excerpt puts it:

Comic strips, evolving from these early cartoons, made their appearance in the late 19th century, and these soon moved away from one-shot narratives to series relating the adventures of a recurring character or set of characters. In the U.S.A, comics were gaining mass popularity through iconic characters such as The Yellow Kid, which established the form of modern comics by combining images with ‘speech bubbles’. This was a significant development, as it allowed comics to use overtly spoken language. Before this, text usually appeared either above or below the images, and not in the panel with the images. These early cartoons and caricatures thus first introduced the ‘speech bubbles’ that are used universally in comic books today, and in doing so, brought overt spoken language into some forms of writing. (Singanapalli, 2011)

But having said that, what exactly is it that speech bubbles do? For one, they bring an element of conversationality to comics. Unlike novels or even short stories, where the narrative element overshadows the conversational element, in comics it is the opposite, thanks to speech bubbles. They are thus also a tool to allow the pictures to seem more life-like and more realistic. It is speech bubbles that actually make comic books similar to a movie or a play.

Speech bubbles form an important part in how comic books convey meaning to the reader: they may not form the vocabulary of comics by themselves, but they play an essential assisting role. The shapes of speech bubbles can decide the tone or attitude of the speaker, and the position of speech bubbles is an important thing to consider when trying to fit your art into a panel. Experimenting with speech bubbles can lead to interesting results in terms of how both the text and the image are interpreted in comics.

Now that we have taken a brief look at panels and speech bubbles, let us move to the crux of the matter: the vocabulary and grammar of comics.

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The Grammar and Vocabulary of Comics