Text and Word Balloons

The text element of the comic medium must be taken into account when developing a good story. Whether the artist decides to create a story entirely with text or not using any text at all, the decision must be a conscious artistic choice.

In word balloons the type of text used can change the way the words are interpreted. Someone saying, “no you can’t” in a normal font has a very different impact from, “NO YOU CAN’T” or even “no you can’t”. These changes in type face and size impact how readers interpret the words being used. This gives the readers a greater sense of the character’s emotions, their personality, and the theme of the story.



Will Eisner, had an especially good instinct for the combination of textual and visual elements. Whenever he incorporated text it always matched the story he was working on.
In the Spirit, Eisner really introduced the idea of dynamic text and titles. In every issue of the Spirit the title of the comic would be incorporated into the body of the first page. It would become an element of the storytelling rather than a simple description that is observed in most comics.

When I'm working on my own comics, I admit that I have a tendency to take the easy road and use computer text, its generally faster and as most of my work is rendered on a computer with a Wacom tablet its faster than printing it out. However, I always do feel a keen sense of disappointment when I look at the finished product. The text element of a visual story must match up to the images that make up the majority of the storytelling or something becomes lost. It is the goal of comic artists to take into account all aspects of their storytelling craft and ensure that no one element will draw to much attention as to pull the audience out of the fantasy that the artist has created.

Here are some interesting pages on text and word balloons in comics.
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~mfram/Pages/3036-sound.html
http://comixtalk.com/comic_theory_101_loopy_framing

Computer vs Traditional

So, I have spent all week sitting in front of my computer cleaning up the pages for my comic final (a few sample pages are available in the last post). And I truly never expected it to be this tedius.

Some people complain that computer work is cheating, that its faster and easier than traditional. This is an argument I'm going to have to disagree with.

True that the undo button is something that I take full advantage of and is something not available in drawing and painting, but I have found that the amount of time it takes to make something look really good, to look really clean and not pixelated or computerized can take just as much time as any traditional media.

Penciling this comic took me about five hours per page. Versus pencil and paper this is a bit faster than the average time of ten hours. However, the clean-up process and the refining of line that is the computerized version of inking is not so quick. For me this process takes almost twice as long per page than any form of finishing, painting, inking, anything.

I would like some feedback if anyone reads this. What is your preference of media? Do you find the computer to be faster or slower than traditional medias and where do you like to use it and where do you not?