Comic lettering: balloon order and reading order
A letterer places balloons in the order you write them, so the order in your script is the reading order on the page.
Below is how that order works, and the few lettering directions I write down.
Balloons are read in the order you write them
Each panel’s balloons are numbered for you: the first name under the panel is balloon 1, the next is balloon 2, and so on. You don’t type the numbers.
A reader goes through them in that order, one balloon at a time.
What you type
## Janida and Janmani on the bus, the road turning to dust behind them.
JANMANI: What is in it?
JANIDA: Nothing.
JANMANI: It moved.What you get
PANEL 1: Janida and Janmani on the bus, the road turning to dust behind them.
What is in it?
Nothing.
It moved.
Three balloons, numbered 1 to 3 in the order they were written. Swap the second and third lines and a different person answers, with the same words.
Where a balloon can go
English-language comics read left to right and top to bottom, and balloons follow the same path across a panel. A letterer puts balloon one up and to the left of balloon two wherever the art allows it.
So the art has to leave room for them there. These are the two notes I get back most often:
- Speaker order and character position should agree. If the character on the right speaks first, the letterer has to run a tail across the panel or place the balloon awkwardly high. Flip who speaks first, or say in the description which side each character is on.
- Balloons cover the top of the panel. Balloons usually take roughly the top quarter. On a page carrying three balloons, keep faces, signs and anything else that matters out of that area.
I fix both in the panel description. Say where each character is standing and the letterer can follow the order.
How many balloons fit
The numbers most letterers work to:
- Around 25 words per balloon before it covers too much of the art.
- Around 35 words per panel across all the balloons and captions together.
- Three or four balloons in a panel before the reading order gets hard to hold. Past four, the preview flags the panel.
A long speech doesn’t need smaller lettering. Split it into two or three balloons from the same speaker and the letterer joins them up, which gives the reader a pause between them.
One speech, one balloon or several
Writing the name again starts a new balloon. Without it, a line stays in one balloon however long it runs.
One balloon, however many lines
Write the name once and keep typing on the lines underneath. Every line belongs to that balloon, so a long speech can run over several lines in your script and still be one balloon.
What you type
## Grandmother puts the bundle into her hands anyway.
JANIDA: You have clearly never met my grandmother.
Or heard the story about the eel trap, the two brothers,
and the flooded rice field.What you get
PANEL 1: Grandmother puts the bundle into her hands anyway.
You have clearly never met my grandmother. Or heard the story about the eel trap, the two brothers, and the flooded rice field.
Three lines, one balloon, numbered once. In the editor the extra lines are indented to line up with the speech, so you can see they belong to one balloon.
Several balloons, one speaker
To split a line across two balloons, write the name twice. The letterer places the two balloons so they read in order.
What you type
## Grandmother puts the bundle into her hands anyway.
JANIDA: You have clearly never met my grandmother.
JANIDA: Or heard the story about the eel trap.What you get
PANEL 1: Grandmother puts the bundle into her hands anyway.
You have clearly never met my grandmother.
Or heard the story about the eel trap.
I use this when I want a pause between the two halves of a line. It’s the closest a comic gets to timing inside a single panel.
Two balloons, joined
A linked balloon is two balloons drawn touching or joined by a short connector, so they read as one continuous line. Add (LINKED) after the name on the second one.
What you type
## Grandmother puts the bundle into her hands anyway.
JANIDA: You have clearly never met my grandmother.
JANIDA (LINKED): Or heard the story about the eel trap.What you get
PANEL 1: Grandmother puts the bundle into her hands anyway.
You have clearly never met my grandmother.
Or heard the story about the eel trap.
They’re still balloon 1 and balloon 2, since a linked pair is two balloons. The (LINKED) note stays on the second balloon in the printed script, so the letterer sees which balloon it belongs to.
I choose by how long a pause I want between the two halves: no pause is one balloon, a short one is a linked pair, and a longer one is two separate balloons.
Description written after dialogue
Everything under a name belongs to that balloon until the next name or the next panel. A blank line inside a speech is a paragraph break in the balloon. So a line of description written after some dialogue becomes part of what the character says.
The preview doesn’t flag this, so it’s an easy mistake to make.
What you type
## Janida holds the bundle against her chest.
JANIDA: Nothing.
She looks away.What you get
PANEL 1: Janida holds the bundle against her chest.
Nothing.
She looks away.
Janida now says “She looks away.” It’s inside balloon one, under her name, and the line the artist was supposed to draw has become a line the character speaks.
A panel is one description followed by its balloons, so anything the reader should see goes above the first name.
What you type
## Janida holds the bundle against her chest, looking away.
JANIDA: Nothing.If looking away is a separate moment, give it a second panel.
Directions worth writing down
Sometimes the letterer needs to know a character is whispering, shouting or speaking from outside the panel. A note in brackets after the name, in caps, tells them how to draw the balloon.
JANIDA (BURST): Stop!- A jagged burst balloon. For a shout, an alarm, or any sudden loud sound.
JANIDA (SMALL): Half taken.- A smaller balloon and smaller lettering. A mutter, an aside, something half meant to be heard.
JANIDA (THOUGHT): Grandmother was right.- A thought balloon, with the scalloped edge and the bubble tail.
JANIDA (OFF): Do not tell anyone.- The speaker is outside the panel. The tail points off the edge instead of at a mouth.
JANIDA (LINKED): Or the eel trap.- Joins this balloon to the one before it, so the two read as one continuous line. Goes on the second balloon.
Any word in caps works the same way, so (RADIO) and (WHISPER) are fine too. These five are the ones that come up most. I write the ones that change how the balloon is drawn and leave out the ones that only describe how a line is said.
The name before the colon only says who’s speaking, so RADIO, VOICE and CAPTION are all just names to the script. That’s why sound effects and captions are written like dialogue: a name in caps, a colon, then the words.
What you type
## Two GUARDS shove past a fruit stall. Oranges everywhere.
SFX: KRAK
CAPTION: Three minutes before the lanterns go out.
CAPTION (JANIDA): I should have run then.What you get
PANEL 1: Two GUARDS shove past a fruit stall. Oranges everywhere.
KRAK
Three minutes before the lanterns go out.
I should have run then.
A caption is lettered in its own box, so it sits outside the reading order of the speech, usually in a corner. A character’s name in the brackets, as in CAPTION (JANIDA), makes it that character’s narration rather than the story’s.
Two people at once
Two balloons can’t be read at once, so one of them comes first. I write them in the order I want them read and put the timing in the description.
What you type
## Both of them answer at the same moment, neither listening.
JANIDA: No.
JANMANI: Yes.What you get
PANEL 1: Both of them answer at the same moment, neither listening.
No.
Yes.
They’re still numbered 1 and 2. The description says they speak at once, and the numbers set who is read first.
Sound effects sit in the art
An SFX line is lettered into the art rather than put in a balloon, though it still gets a number like the balloons around it. Put it at the point in the panel where the sound happens, and the letterer places it next to whatever makes the noise.
Describe the size. A KRAK that fills half a panel and a krak from the next room are spelled the same in the script, so I say in the description which one I mean.