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April 8, 2024 The Expanding Speech Balloon

First a quiz.

Each of the following images includes one or more speech balloons. What do the images mean?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Before I give the answers, here’s a micro-history of the speech balloon.

In his unexpectedly canonical The Lexicon of Comicana (1980), cartoonist Mort Walker categorizes speech balloons as a kind of “fumetti” (Italian for “clouds” or “smoke” though Walker says “balloon”): “the things that float above a character’s head and contain what he’s thinking or saying.”

But the convention dates back at least to medieval manuscripts, AKA “speech scrolls.”

Standard-looking speech balloons predate the comics medium too, especially during the nineteenth century. Here’s an 1860 editorial cartoon featuring Abraham Lincoln:

The speech balloon took hold in the comics medium as the comics medium took hold in the 1890s. Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid provides a transitional example, with the Kid’s shirt functioning as a speech container too:

The convention was so prevalent in 20th-century comics that in 2000 philosopher David Carrier used it as the key to his definition: “a narrative sequence with speech balloons.”

Carrier is wrong (some comics don’t include speech balloons), but the convention remains prevalent in comics and — the point of this blog post — increasingly outside of them.

And not just speech balloons, but their paradoxical sibling: wordless speech balloons.

Based on Walker’s definition, a wordless speech balloon should communicate only one thing: that a character is speaking. But Walker also illustrates how the lines that construct the balloon convey additional information.

Remove the words, and the images still convey much of the same meanings:

All of the examples from the opening quiz are wordless too, but their meanings are more complex. Each also illustrated an article from the New York Times.

1.

Gabriel Carr’s illustration for Art Cullen’s “We Were Friends for Years. Trump Tore Us Apart.”

2.

Nathalie Lees’ illustration for Catherine Pearson’s “It’s Tough to Talk to Your Partner About Sex. Here’s How to Start.”

3.

Doug Chayka’s illustration for Carl Zimmer’s “A.I. is Learning What It Means to Be Alive.”

4.

Brian Rea’s illustration for Courtenay Hameister’s “We Were the ‘Fat Couple’?“

5.

Nicolas Ortega’s illustration for Jancee Dunn’s “8 Things You Should Never Say to Your Partner.”

6.

Nicolas Ortega’s illustration for Jancee Dunn’s “How to Bargian Like a Kidnap Negotiator.”

While each image illustrates its article’s core idea well, all six speech balloons share two other qualities: they were all published between December 2023 and March 2024, and they’re all objectified.

I borrow the term from comics philosopher Roy T. Cook’s 2012 essay “Why Comics Are Not Films: Metacomics and Medium-Specific Conventions”:

“A balloon is objectified when it is placed in such a way as to force the reader to interpret the balloon as part of the physical universe inhabited by the characters and the objects depicted …”

I’m leaving out Cook’s final phrase, “in a particular panel,” because the above examples are from the New York Times, which is not a comic, and so the objectified balloons do not appear in comics panels.

The fact is significant because Cook also argues that speech balloons, when they appear in a medium other than comics (such as film), “are a non-standard feature, typically functioning as an explicit reference to comics.”

That was twelve years ago. Based on the six examples appearing within a very recent four-month period, the speech balloon may no longer be primarily identified as a comics convention.

Speech balloons may just be speech balloons.

The best evidence for that claim has been around since 2007 when Apple released the first iPhone. The designers used speech balloons for texting.

They added thought-balloon reactions in 2016.

Perhaps most definitively, the identifying symbol for texting is a wordless speech balloon:

Though it might be debatable whether a text screen is in the comics form, your phone is definitely not in the comics medium. I also seriously doubt you think at all about comics while texting.

That’s because speech balloons have expanded beyond them.

After drafting the above, the New York Times ran another more complex example. Erik Carter’s illustration for A. O. Scott’s “Like My Book Title? Thanks, I Borrowed It” includes animation as the three-panel row spins bodies behind Walt Whitman’s head and speech balloon.

Here are three snips, the middle one caught mid-motion:

Though in this case we can restore Cook’s phrase “in a particular panel,” I don’t think Carter’s panels evoke comics panels, which conventionally include a vertical gutter between them. The animation further reduces a sense of the image “functioning as an explicit reference to comics.” Though the balloons aren’t objectified with the same three-dimensional techniques as the first six examples, the animation does create the illusion of two surfaces, with the heads and speech balloons placed “above” the moving background, which means the overall image still creates a three-dimensional effect.

Now I need to post this before the speech balloon expands again.

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