A Big Spread-2

A fter yesterday's post about the upcoming Bacchus collection I had a couple of follow-on thoughts. Firstly, all those ugly little creatures were drawn by Pete Mullins. You can see how he's turned this one into a Kubrick reference:


They are called the screaming habdabs:

abdabs /ˈabdabz/ (also habdabs)
▶plural noun
Brit. informal (often in phr. the screaming abdabs) nervous anxiety or irritation.
– origin 1940s: of unknown origin.

The habdabs have often been read as synonym for Delirium Tremens (or 'giving the invisible man a handshake') an unspeakable condition that I personally hope never to suffer. Tremens is a character in the story, and thus so are the habdabs. The great thing about cartooning in its very essence, is that nothing is literal. Abstract ideas, propositions, medical conditions, can be made into characters. A character can wear all of his guilt in a wretched suit of Tattoos.


One of the saddening tendencies of the late comic books is the habit of getting literal. There are some obvious outward signs of this. One such example is the decline of the thought balloon, because although we hear the speech of others, as seen in their speech balloons, we are not privy to their thoughts and so, the theory goes, these should not be made visible. Thus in the more literal-minded comics of our days, such as those from Vertigo, thought balloons have been expunged and replaced by the cinematic technique of the voice-over.
Another comics trick that has largely gone south is the speaking building. This was a staple of the newspaper Illustrated strips, used as a way of setting a scene while simultaneously jumping into the dialogue. It could also be a way of breaking up a static conversation, by cutting to an exterior view. But this had to go. Why? Because buildings don't speak.




I have always liked the talking building:


But the talking building has got nothing on the thinking truck:


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Just pointed out to me is this interview with Stephen King from May 14 2010 :

But he fell away from the genre for several years, and in that time the form had evolved considerably, which made writing for the medium a new challenge for even as seasoned a writer as King. “You have to be very humble, and you have to take advice because it’s a new way of seeing, to actually write it is a new way of writing...
One example:Thought bubbles—those puffy, dotted clouds that were a staple of early comics—have been phased out. “I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don't do that anymore.’ ‘You don't do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they're thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’” So King happily re-wrote to fit the new style—though he still laments the loss of the thought bubble. “I think it's a shame to lose that arrow out of your quiver. One of the nice things about the written word as opposed to the spoken word in a movie is that you can go into a character's thoughts. You do it in books all the time, right?”

Poor old Stephen King, made to write in the Vertigo house style. I hope he didn't go away thinking all of comics work that way.

literal speech balloon

I was glad to catch Bryan Talbot in conversation this week before we appeared on stage, because I know we don't see eye to eye on a lot of aesthetic and historical matters, and I wanted to get them out of the way in case we embarrassed ourselves publicly. So I found myself in an interesting technical discussion which can be nicely extended into an essay here. Bryan criticised my 'fumetti' sequence in The Fate of the Artist, in which hayley campbell is interviewed about the disappearance of her beloved father. Here is the first page of it. Ignore the obvious goof in panel 1 of attributing the interviewer's question to the subject by encircling it in a lasso resembling, for the sake of this discussion, a speech balloon.


The seven page hayley sequence is intended of course to evoke the 'fumetti' idiom, the English language name for a style of comic strip that is said to have originated in Italy, in which photographs take the place of drawings. Here is an attractive example of the style (Check here for the whole work in 36 panels, by Charlie Beck)


Bryan said to me that he feels that the hayley passage fails because he doesn't believe the character is actually speaking. I said, what, you mean the thought processes are not convincingly those of a nineteen year old girl? Bryan replied, no, I mean the face in the picture doesn't correspond to what is being said in the balloon, and the mouth isn't even open. Ah. the conversation didn't get much further because I was taken aback; it was something I hadn't even thought to prepare a defence for. I do say clearly that it's a transcript of a taped interview (entirely a fiction), and I've taken pains (as has Mick Evans, who brought the parts together at the design stage) to make it look roughly cut and glued from a typeset document; it's NOT direct speech. There is no sound.

I worked hard to avoid the kind of histrionics you see in the second example above, in which skill and craft are evident but inauthenticity is the initial impression. It has a feeling of being staged (though note that Beck arrived at the same conclusion I did, that a series of open mouths on one character looks too wrong). Talbot's seven page episode of fumetti in his Alice in Sunderland is so something else that it would seem eccentric to make a comparison. It's perfectly appropriate to his purpose.


So let me stick to the subject of the word balloon, which is the real issue here, and it dovetails with an earlier discussion I had with Bryan. In the following example, do we believe that the 2,000 year old bust of Caesar is LITERALLY SPEAKING the words from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar?


Or would we say: no, it's not direct speech but a quote contained in a balloon of attribution which combines with the image to make a graphic construct at the same time more direct and more complex than the sum of the elements. Note that in an earlier version I had the quote "I came, I saw, I conquered," but ditched it as the words looked too simply like words that ought to go with the face.

The earlier discussion (with Bryan) concerned my assertion that we should not corral willy nilly under the rubric of 'comics' old works that appear to have the same formal elements, because there is a tendency to misinterpret their function, for example the word balloon. The most intelligent view on the subject is the 22 page essay, On labels, loops and bubbles by Thierry Smolderen in Comic Art #8. He writes:

Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, labels consistently appeared in political satires. Because their function seems, at first glance, similar to that of the 20th century device, the modern reader is tempted to read them as regular speech balloons, ignoring the fact that there isn't anything remotely similar between a 20th century comic strip and a 17th century allegory...
In an allegorical picture, each character (or, sometimes, object) has both a literal and a metaphorical meaning. On the literal level, the picture can mean just about anything - or make no sense at all; the 'tableau' is merely a hieroglyph; its external appearance needs not be more plausible or coherent than the garbled letters of a cipher. Thanks to this freedom, the satirists were allowed to combine topical interests with any wild fancy of their imagination...
In such a context, the reason why the labels cannot be read in the same way as our modern speech balloons becomes clearer. Nothing is alive or natural in allegorical constructs: like rebus riddles, they exist in a timeless and spaceless dimension, in which no living sound will ever travel. How could metaphors freely dialogue between themselves like characters in a comic strip? Any verbal exchange included in an allegorical picture could only be the metaphor for something else.

(example from an 1860 Currier and Ives print used in the article)

I think the real difference between Bryan and me is that he likes and believes in 'comics,' (see his three page history of British comics in the Guardian last week) and imagines I do also, but I don't. It is a medium that becomes more conservative and moribund every year. All the theories are designed to shackle it to a metronome of measured time analogous to the cinematic. Give me an art that doesn't need to constantly resubmit its claim to the respect that readers award to the 'realistic,' which must dress the facile in verisimilitude. I want a truth that has no need to play games of make-believe.

p.s. Of course, on Bryan's behalf I should say that in order to do what they do, artists need to be single minded to the point of thinking everybody must do things their way. For example I remember Pekar criticising Spiegelman for using animals in Maus. And God knows what innocent Charlie Beck thinks of me for dragging him into my argument. Check his page and lighten my guilt.

pps. re talking things that are not literally talking, see my post on Rome's 'talking statues'.

happy birthday to ME

For I'm a felly good jollo (52). Seeing my call for a photo or two of me and wee Cal in San Diego last week, as we came home without any, Andy Runton of Owly fame emailed a couple. After my rictus grin on the front of PW Comics Week, which you may have missed as I didn't draw attention to it, I have resolved to smile no more for the birdy, any birdy.


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In preparation for meeting him at the Brisbane Writers festival next month, I'm reading Guy Delisle's excellent Shenzhen; a travelogue from China , in which I have come across this interesting use of the forbidden technique of crossed balloon tails.


I say interesting because I myself have just been caught red-handed by the calligrapher supreme Todd Klein, in his review of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. While otherwise praising me, he writes: Occasionally the white brush-stroke tails cross, as in the panel (below), which is further confused by criss-crossing white bullet-trails. This violates so many things about good lettering that I hardly know where to start!


I really did think hard about whether the world would let me get away with that one. As I caught my two comedic characters in a chaotic crossfire, running around in my noodle was the famous snatch of dialogue from the Ghostbusters movie:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

"There oughta be a law!""There already is, m'lud."

T his post relates to both the courtroom sketching I've been showing over the past ten days and my post of feb 25 about why on a comic book page the lettering should be done first. There are five stages in this sequence. I can't recall now why I would have gone to the trouble of making copies as I was going along. There must have been a presentation at the college coming up, but I don't rememeber ever using these for such a purpose. Stage one is the lettering, with just enough of a sketch to get the composition clear in my head. Click on each for a legible view.



There's a stage missing, as I have relettered the page to get a better descending rhythm to the balloons, and also altered the angle of approach slightly to make a deeper pictorial space (though you probably can't tell that from the scribble above). This was to be the first page of the final volume of Bacchus, so I was prepared to spend more time than normal to make sure it worked well. The main figures also look like they've been placed by me. I'm still happy with the composition here. Pete Mullins has gone in over my rough, added all the foreground figures and thoroughly worked out the perspective.



Next, I've pencilled and inked Bacchus and the other principal figures. There was to be a standing figure in the far corner, but I've decided to eliminate him.



Pete inked everything else



Then the page went to Anne for cleaning up, which in my studio was usually a lot of work and included such things as whiting the point on the balloon outline where the tail joins it. Since the balloons were drawn first it was usually wise to leave the tails until we knew exactly where the figure was going to be. You can follow that process above.



This appeared in Bacchus #16, which was (without checking) august 1996, before I got into the court sketching work. Perhaps Pete was already doing it and I thought it a good idea to take advantage of his experience. That would have been the reason I gave him so much to do on this page.

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p.s. at the time of posting this, Blogger is having problems with pictures. I see that my photo in the sidebar has disappeared for instance, and the system won't let me upload any new pics. This one is already in the can and the pictures are working at my end. Any problems let me know. This will be a pretty pointless sort of post if the images have all gone AWOL.

The last word in Speech Balloons. (rule #3)

About these 'RULES' of mine. I originally collected and numbered them for a talk I gave, which I titled 'Towards a rhetoric of comics'. In other words, a bunch of principles codified for assisting a cartoonist to put his thoughts across in the clearest and most persuasive way.
Jessica Abel drew a two page comic strip explaining how a comic strip works, and I have a problem with it. I don't think it's Jessica's fault. She has tried to explain something which under closer scrutiny proves to be faulty, but she's too sweet to say so. Now, me, I'd say: "this system is shambolic, I'm proposing a new one whether you like it or not."
The problem lies in the placing of word balloons. Convention (or Jessica) says that comics are a 'nested system'. You read a panel from left to right and from top to bottom and, when you've read everything in that panel you move left-right and top-bottom and read everything in the next one until you've completed the page. However, in all of my watching and noting over many years, the reader, even the experienced one, after reading the contents of a balloon, will be inclined to read the next nearest balloon irrespective of whether the rest of the balloons in the current panel have already been taken in. If the next nearest balloon is in the next panel, or even the panel underneath, then the cartoonist risks losing control of his/her narration. Therefore the very first thing the artist must do upon a approaching a page is pin down the balloons. In fact I go so far as to do all of the lettering first, because in addition to the above, lettering will take much less reduction in size than a picture, therefore it is essential to give the lettering priority. When I am certain that the lettering follows reading-logic, only then do I start drawing. Each balloon should follow clearly from the one before it no matter where the panel borders are placed.

example a: a page from Bacchus vol 1, Immortality isn't Forever (right above). The first panel is the tall one at the left of the page. My system dictates that the lettering in this panel go at the very top and there only, even though it might function better nearer to the heads of the speakers, otherwise the reader would be required to break a basic reading rule and move up the page to the next panel and its balloons, instead of following the conventional law of top-bottom.

example b: page at pencil stage from my cockeyed version of the Minotaur's story in Bacchus vol 3, Doing the Islands with Bacchus. lest you think that my system is inevitably going to require that all the balloons float at the tops of the panels, here's a variation. In this case the position of the balloons in the second panel have determined that those in the last panel must be placed very low, in fact at the foot of the page. The course of the balloons follows a downward sinuous line. They can only be read one way. This sample is also useful in that you can see I have ink-lettered the balloons while the pictures are only sketched roughly. In fact if you have the book you'll know that these pictures were replaced by others at the inking stage. I wouldn't normally do this much sketching (any) before lettering except that this was an odd layout that required special attention.
To summarize:
CAMPBELL"S RULE #3: In spite of what you may read, comics are not a nested system; a reader will read a balloon and then read the next nearest balloon even if they haven't already read all the ones in the current panel.

Other relevant thoughts on the general subject of balloons: Eisner has stated that giving a character more than one balloon in a panel gives the lie to the panel being a moment in time, with characters frozen in a pose relevant to what they are saying (therefore they can only be saying a limited amount). We all have our rules to make our specific way of doing things into a coherent system, but I don't worry too much about that one (you take your pick). I distrust the idea of comics being tied to 'time'. it's too close to the movie model for my liking. And there are bigger lies to worry about, like who said they didn't steal the tarts, or said they didn't kill Cock Robin.

Alex Toth wrote something about lettering that stuck in my head. It may have been here but I can't find it again. That site has Toth doing commentaries on a bunch of his old short stories. The 50s romance stories are the ones most worth checking out. He said that he liked a lot of 'padding' in the balloons, in other words, a comfortable amount of white space around the block of text. I have taken that one on board completely.

At the top of this post is a brace of word balloons from a detail of a panel in The Black Diamond Detective Agency that express my present aesthetic ideal. The balloon should be a thoughtfully designed shape that relates to the things around it in its pictorial context. I absolutely DETEST and ABHOR those goddam elipses they use nowadays in the comic books. I LOATHE them and will NOT TOLERATE them. I also don't care for them. I've heard all the economic arguments, so don't send them to me. Within the balloon the block of lettering should also form a designed shape, which need not echo the shape of the balloon around it, but the two should be aware of the existence of each other. It need not be said that I also have no time for computer fonts. But thirdly and don't forget this one, the space between the block of lettering and the balloon is a yet another element that needs to be carefully considered and shaped, the 'padding ' that Toth speaks of. Half close your eyes and you'll see it as a white stream flowing around the block of text.
In my last couple of jobs I have taken to painting the balloons onto the page of art (before the picture, and then tidy them up later) in a pale yellow. I want the balloon to be a painted presence on the page instead of a hole through it to another dimension. I arrived at this by an evolutionary process after I started doing the painted books (in Batman: Order of Beasts I used a font, with irregular balloon shapes but with a holding line around them. The holding lines proved to be a technical pain in the ass, so in the 13 page Escapist story I did I tried losing those and lettered onto a tracing paper overlay by hand, which is very simple to align with the time honoured manner without extra computer work. This proved satisfactory so I carried the approach over to Diamond and I'm also using it on my new one, The Amazing Remarkable mr. Leotard.

My pal Dave Gibbons felt compelled to throw in his two cents on my last 'rule' . Since he does his own lettering and it is always faultless, I'll be very interested indeed to hear his thoughts on this one .

Finally, if you click the 'balloons' label below you'll find an earlier post on the subject.

Hold that Thought balloon!

My pal Evans just sent me this link from the Australian: "Myth, legend and the academic discipline of history all serve the same end, to enrich our understanding of ourselves, argues Alex Miller."
This fits with my earlier statement (dec. 6) that I'm interested in the blurry areas between things. In this case, between fiction and non-fiction (history, reportage, biography). "Each generation rewrites history for itself and, in doing so, refutes the truth of much of the history written by its parents' generation." The next part strikes me as extraordinary: "...a retired German historian who is driven to write a factual story not as history but as fiction. He does this to preserve the story against the revisions of future generations." Think about that one. He dressed the facts as fiction for their own protection
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My pal mr j, last seen here on (dec. 4) sent me his latest cartoon, this one in response to the Hayley Campbell horrors I've been showing. click to enlarge

Speaking of which,
The Ripper Files, Part 5: this is the last of those I scanned while I had the 'Files' out. The second one is a guest spot by me. I never dreamed the wee lass, then aged 7, would adopt Morticia Addams as her fashion mentor.
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Make sure you've read the comments for yesterday's post as the subject of my piece, John Coulthart himself, threw in a couple of paragraphs of pure information.
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Andrew J. Bonia, who contributed that great little Simpsons piece here a couple of days back, which involved tinkering with a speech balloon, writes about the elimination of thought balloons from the conventional comic book style and their replacement with turgid running voice-overs. The 'thought' bubble (or balloon) is one of the few inventions truly indigenous to the twentieth century comic strip and it would be sad to reject it in order to make comics more like movies (see comments on this theme under 'Things' two days back), or because it is somehow pictorially unseemly for a tough heroic figure to have fluffy clouds around his head. When you tell an anecdote orally it's commonplace to say 'I thought' and 'she thought' etc., and perfectly logical to codify that on paper in a thought bubble. And if it makes your character less heroic, try taking the pole out of his ass. Always works for me.
Here is a History of speech balloons since the dawn of time. But observe Thierry Smolderen's admonishment in Comic Art #8 in his very excellent and lavishly illustrated essay, Of labels, Loops and Bubbles, that the exact function of these comparable devices needs to be interpreted in entirely different ways for different historical periods.
waitaminute. the phone.
Anne? yeah, what... yes of course they know I meant take the pole out my character's and not actually my own. yeah, sure... very funny... yeh...anyway, remember to pick up the cat food... and thanks for roning.