Comic lettering: balloon order and reading order
A letterer places balloons in the order you wrote them. Once you have that, most of the rest follows.
Here’s the order, and the handful of directions I actually write down.
The order you write is the order it reads
Balloons in a panel are numbered by where they sit in the script. The first cue under a panel is balloon one, the next is balloon two, and on down the panel. Nobody types those numbers.
So the script is the sequence a reader moves through, one balloon at a time. That’s the job.
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, one to three, because that’s the order they were written in. Swap the second and third lines and you’ve changed who answers whom, without touching a word.
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. Two things come out of that, and they’re the two notes I get back most:
- 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. Roughly the top quarter is balloon country. A face, a sign, the sky: keep them out of there on a page carrying three balloons.
I fix both in the panel description. Say where people are standing and the order takes care of itself.
How many balloons fit
The numbers most letterers work to:
- Around 25 words per balloon before it starts eating 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.
A long speech doesn’t have to become smaller lettering. Break it into two or three balloons from the same speaker and the letterer joins them up, which gives the reader somewhere to breathe.
One speech, one balloon or several
A long line can stay in one balloon or become several. Whether you write the name again is what decides it.
One balloon, however many lines
Write the cue once and keep typing underneath. Every line below belongs to that balloon, so you can break a long speech across your screen without breaking it on the page.
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. While you’re writing, the continued lines sit indented under the speech column, so the shape of the balloon shows in the draft too.
Several balloons, one speaker
Write the name again and you get a second balloon. Same speech, two shapes on the page, placed 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.
Balloon one and balloon two, from the same mouth. I use this when I want the pause. Two balloons put a beat between the halves of a line, which is the closest a comic gets to timing inside a single image.
Two balloons, joined
Sometimes the speech wants to be two shapes and still read as one continuous line. That’s a linked balloon, two balloons drawn touching or tied by a short connector. Mark 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.
Still balloon one and balloon two, since a linked pair is two balloons. The direction rides along with the second one into the printed script, so the letterer reads it against the balloon it belongs to.
Which of the three I want comes down to how much air sits between the halves: none makes it one balloon, a breath makes it a linked pair, a real pause makes it two.
Once a panel starts talking, it keeps talking
This is the one that catches people, because it goes quietly.
Everything under a cue belongs to that balloon until the next cue 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 more of what the character is saying.
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.
The fix is the order. A panel is one description followed by its balloons, so anything the reader should see goes above the first cue.
What you type
## Janida holds the bundle against her chest, looking away.
JANIDA: Nothing.If the looking away is its own moment, it’s a second panel. That’s the answer more often than it looks.
Directions worth writing down
Every now and then the letterer needs to know somebody is whispering, or shouting, or speaking from off the panel. A parenthetical after the name, in caps, tells them how the balloon is drawn.
JANIDA (BURST): Stop!- A jagged burst balloon. For a shout, an alarm, or anything that breaks the panel’s quiet.
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.- Join this balloon to the one before it, so two shapes read as one continuous line. Goes on the second balloon.
Any caps word carries through, so (RADIO) and (WHISPER) work as well as these. Those five are the ones that come up most. I write the ones that change the drawing and leave out the ones that only describe a performance.
The name in the cue is only who’s speaking, so RADIO, VOICE and CAPTION are all just names as far as the script cares. That’s why sound effects and captions use the same mark as dialogue.
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. Naming the speaker in the parenthetical gives a narrating character a voice separate from the story’s own.
Two people at once
Two balloons can’t occupy the same place, so somebody gets read 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 still come out one and two. The description carries the simultaneity, the balloons carry the order.
Sound effects sit in the art
An SFX cue is lettered into the art rather than placed in the reading path, so it doesn’t take a number in the balloon order. Put it where it belongs in the beat of the panel and the letterer places it against whatever makes the noise.
Size is worth describing. A KRAK that fills half a panel and a krak from the next room are the same four letters in the script, so I say which one I mean in the description.