HOW ARGO DOES COMICS
PART TWO:
TALK SOME SENSE!

Welcome back!  And apologies to those of you with slow connections... this part of the tutorial is a little more graphic intense than the other.

So in the first part of this little area of the archive, we've learned how to add our panels to a full size page, using scripts and techniques to add borders and such.  Well, that's great and all, but how do we get the characters to actually speak during all of this?  Well, that's where adding word balloons and caption tags comes in.  So get used to your Text Tool, your Selection Tools, your Layers, and your Fill Tools in your paint program of choice, because you'll be using them a lot!

0.  ON DIALOGUE BALLOONS...

Before we get into making dialogue balloons and captions, we should first make sure we're on the same page as far as what a dialogue balloon is, and what the parts of a dialogue (or speech) balloon are, as well as the other forms of address in a standard comic.  A speech balloon is primarily composed of three parts which I have named in manners may or may not conform to what every comic book style book might call them.  They are: A) The balloon itself, which provides a backdrop for the dialogue, in effect separating the words from the background for clarity, B) The tail (or tag), which points to a character in the scene to give the reader the idea who is speaking, and C) the text (or actual dialogue), which is the text being said.

You'll see that I give an example of a thought balloon here, too.  A thought balloon is naturally a dialogue balloon that instead delves into a character's unspoken thoughts.  Rather than an actual, connected speech tail, you have thought bubbles that lead to the character who is thinking.  But you knew that, right? 

Now, personally, I almost never use thought bubbles in my work, unless I do them for comedic intent.  I just have a bias against them because they remind me too much of those cheesy 50's and early 60's comics where a character would sit there and think in plot summaries, or would think things that are painfully apparent to any reader with a modicum of sense and two good eyes.  That and they seem to work better in a more comedic context.  That, and the fact that a thought balloon tends to convey a sense of a third person omniscient viewpoint, while using a caption (Which is the way I've begun to lean) tends to feel more like a third-person limited viewpoint, where you only see into the mind of a single character and therefore are more 'in tune' or 'closer' with him or her than everyone in your comic.  But that's just the way I write.  Blame recent comic writers.  You, on the other hand, may feel free to use them and I won't sic any vicious animals on you. 

That's because I'm such a nice guy, dammit.  ^_^

There are other forms of text in just about any comic you'd care to see, such as the caption tag and the special effect.  Caption Tags, unlike speech or thought balloons, captions very seldom have the tails that point to their originator.  Most often (except in the case of black and white comics,) in fact, they are set in a different color specifically to separate them from speech balloons and thought balloons.  At first, captions tended to more often than not be nothing more than placeholders, telling the reader something about the change of scenery in a way that only an omniscient narrator could.  The use of captions has become more commonplace nowdays as continuing a person's speech when the person is not actually talking in the camera shot, such as a scene shift or a flashback sequence.  They have also become more commonly used as a replacement for the thought balloons when a story or scene focuses more on a single character.  See copies of Grant Morrison's JLA work, Mark Waid's and Geoff Johns' work on Flash, Kevin Smith's Daredevil run, or Chuck Dixon's Nightwing, for semi-recent examples of this sort of use.  That's what's helped to popularize the technique.

The last sort of text I'll go into is the Special (or Sound) Effect, sometimes notated in script format as SFX, because most writers can't spell its technically correct term, Onomatopoeia, without setting their dictionaries afire.  Onomatopoeia is, according to Webster's, "The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to."  Or... far less precisely, it pretty much covers words that approximate sounds.  BOOM.  CRACK.  THWACK.  BUDDABUDDABUDDA.  Now, alone, those aren't much of anything.  But when the bad guy picks up the ray gun and fires it with an accompanying ZORCH, or even a KA-ZAP, those are Special Effects. 

No two people I know do Special Effects text the same way.  My KABLAM! and yours might turn out ridiculously differently.  What I've noticed about them that tends to hold true all around is that they most often no longer have a 'bounding balloon' the way speech, thought or captions do.  It used to be that the sound would come in a nice little radiating explosion balloon, (as shown on the left) akin to what you sometimes saw during fight sequences in the campy Batman series of the 60's.  The reason those were used a lot by letterers of comics of the time was two-fold.  First, it gave the colorist an idea where to lay his halftone pattern, so it was tres important to have an ink line giving the colorist that extra space.  With modern color seps and computerized fonts that can be overlaid on a scanned picture, they're not really necessary anymore.  Most letterers just overlay the font and make sure that the color and outline of it allow it to be seen against the background.  That's what I do, too.  The cool thing about SFX is that they don't necessarily have to be linear (left to right on the same line) the way the other text types do.  It's not at all out of the ordinary to see an SFX rolling from top to bottom or couched in diagonally to follow the action of a scene.  If it helps, think of your captions, speech balloons and thought balloons (if you choose to use them) as separate entities from the panel scene, while the SFX are actually part of the scene.

1.  MOVING RIGHT ALONG TO TYPING TEXT!

Actually, and probably fairly surprisingly, you'll find that this is the far easier part of the lesson compared to all that crap about tags and captions and bubbles.  The reason for this is that I almost without fail use the same techniques for all my balloons and captions.  Once you've learned how to do a speech balloon, the thought balloon and the caption follow the exact same steps, only with a different means of selection.

If you're a crappy speller, you tend to forget stuff when you're typing, or you just do a helluva lot of improvisation, you can always copy and paste the text you're going to use directly from your script.  I'm going to do that, because in the pre-fab script I did last episode, I used ALL CAPS to designate to myself that those should be spots where I want emphasis placed, be it italics, bold, or bold italics.  Nine times out of ten, I do that because the fonts I lean toward are all caps to begin with.  You don't have to live by that circumstance.  It's becoming more and more accepted in comics to use upper and lowercase lettering.  I'm just curmudgeonly like that.  ^_^  But keep in mind that if you want emphasis placed on a word or the like, you should try to note that in your script... remembering it at the last second when you have all this art floating in your head bites.

So let's take a look at the pair of scenes I put together in the first tutorial, hm?  You don't have to go there.  I'll describe them.  In both, you notice I left some dead space (I prefer to call it 'extra room', but any art major will look at those and ask me what up with the dead space) near the top to fit in the dialogue.  Now, we're going to go ahead and add that dialogue, using Photoshop's (ne, PSP's) Text Tool.  Photoshop 6 really got this right.  Rather than typing your text in a dialogue window, you can now type it directly onto your image to see what it looks like as you go.

Remember a few things as you type:

1. Your text should be center justified.  In Photoshop, that means clicking on the centering button in your text tool dialogue (in PS6, this is located at the top of the screen, next to the text color indicator).

2. You want to be able to see your text against the background!  Granted, we'll be making it black text on a white backdrop later, but for positioning and later, using selection tools, we have to be able to know where the text begins and ends!

3. You want to keep your balloon style in mind when formatting your text's line breaks.  For example, a speech and thought balloon tend to be round in shape, necessitating slightly more odd formatting in the lines to accommodate a round selection later, whereas the captions tend to be rectangular, and can be more forgiving, as shown on the right.  You have to pretty much eyeball this... there's not a particular method I can think of other than plug and chug.

4. You want your font's point size to make the lettering legible, but not so large that you'll crowd your scene.  11-12 points, depending on the font, is what I tend to use... but you can vary that to your own taste.

So let's look at what I've done so far:

Okay, the first thing I want you to notice is that I know that the text is going to be selected in dialogue balloons, so I've tried to keep to a elliptical shape with my text, for easy selection later.  I did the text in white... that'll change later, but for now, it stands out against my dark backdrop.  If you look on the right of the screen-grab, near the bottom, you can see my layers tab.  Note that the text is ABOVE the layers of my two panels.  This is a MUST to see the text on the finished product.  Going from bottom upward, this will be how your layers will stack:  The background (your main page) is your bottommost layer, then topped by the layers for the panels themselves, then a layer I call the CAPTION LAYER which will contain your balloons of all sorts, then the text for the captions and dialogue. 

Another thing that I want you to notice is that for my first heroine's dialogue, which reads like this on the script:

    HEROINE 1:
            But what if I don't WANT to become a statue?

    HEROINE 1: (connected)
            It's just... just so LAME.

I've separated her dialogue into two separate text bundles in Photoshop.  We'll connect those (as the script suggests) with a connecting tail, as I'll show you soon.  But in order to have the greatest latitude to do so, you'll want to separate connected bunches of speech into different layers.  Meaning, type your first bit, hit OK, or the checkmark in PS6, and then separately do your next bit of type.  You'll be thankful for it, especially in Photoshop, where it's pretty easy to move text selections around.

2.  SELECTING A BALLOON

Selections for dialogue balloons are thirty-one flavors of easy, when you get right down to what the balloon really is.  It's an ellipse or circle with a fairly straight tail connected to it.  And both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro have the tools for doing that easy enough.  You'll notice on the pic above, both are already ready in my Photoshop toolbar.  The Elliptical Marquee, located on the left right under the Photoshop Eye logo, and the Polygon selection lasso, located right beneath that.  BUT BEFORE WE DO THAT, we want to make a new layer specifically for our balloons.

So go into the Layer Menu (in older versions and PSP this might be located elsewhere) and select New > Layer.  The default settings (Normal and 100% Opacity) are what you want, and it'll probably help you to name the layer BALLOONS or CAPTIONS, the way I do.  Now, you have an otherwise transparent layer created.  Drag that, in your layers window, to a level between your panels and your actual text, as is shown on the right:

Got it?

Good.

Now, while this layer is active, we're going to make selections for our first balloon.  I chose a harder balloon, one with a connected tail, but the general principle is all the same, and I trust alla yous to be able to extrapolate how to do the far easier single balloon setup from how I do this. 

First, I want to select an area around my first bit of text with the elliptical marquee.  As the screenshots below will show, you should have the nice little 'marching ants' dealio going around to show you where your base balloon will be.  You want to leave a little room all around your text, so you have some empty space between the text and the edge of the balloon, as well.

Now, if you're doing captions, rather than dialogue balloons, you'll start with a rectangular marquee, instead.  And if you're doing thought balloons, you'll want to become familiar with the SHIFT key... well, hell.  You'll want to become familiar with it anyway!  The Shift key allows you to ADD to a selection.  You'll notice that if you hold the shift key, your little pointer icon will get a small plus sign (+) next to it.  This indicates that what you next select will be added to your current selection.  That's how I made the multiple balloons in 2, below, and that's what you'll need to do to create your tails.  But if you're doing a thought balloon, the best bet is to do an elliptical marquee, like the dialogue balloon, and then add multiple, smaller elliptical marquees all around the edge of your first one, while holding down the shift key. 

Now you see yet another reason I don't do thought balloons.  They're %@!*)!&# DIFFICULT!!!

Okay, enough of that.  After I've selected all the base balloons for that character (or just one, if there's only one bit of dialogue in that panel), it's time to do my tails.  My own dialogue balloons will have two: a connecting tail and a standard pointer tail.  These I do with the polygonal lasso tool, since it will easily create straight lines.  Holding down the Shift key (see above), I create a four-sided shape that connects my two balloons together, actually overlapping my current selections.  And then, holding down the Shift key again, I create a simple triangle that overlaps into my speech balloon nearest my speaking character.  See 1 and 2 below for how I what my own selections look like after I'm done... I've zoomed in to give you a better look.

1.

2.

3.  FILLING FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Okay, now that we have our selection areas, it's time to color them in.  This is why I've told you to create a new layer and keep it active, because your selection area now isn't fouled up by the panel background.  Instead, it's a selection of a transparent layer, and you can easily fill that with the fill tool.

Ah-ha!  You say!  This is where we color it white, right? 

Well, no.  Not yet...  See, on my background it won't make much difference, because you won't see it.  But a dialogue balloon, as well as a thought balloon and a caption, should be made to stand out somewhat from the background it's plastered on.  Imagine that you're doing a superhero comic and a scene calls for a character to speak to another while flying, all over a blue backdrop spotted with white clouds.  Or he's standing in front of a snowy background.  What separates the white of your speech balloons from the white of the clouds or the snow?  Or to put it into better perspective, which of the two balloons below draws your attention more?

If you said number 1, it might be time to go have a nice talk with your ophthalmologist.  See how 1 blends into the background while 2 stands out?  If that red were my backdrop for a scene, a reader might skim over balloon 1.  But the border on balloon 2 seems to demand attention.

So in other words, what we do, first and foremost, is change our background color to white, and our foreground color to black.  This gives us easy access to both.  Then we fill our selection outline with black using the fill tool... if you have a setting for anti-aliasing, make sure that it's checked on, so you get a smooth border, not a pixelated one. 

After that, we will be contracting the selection outline.  In Photoshop, this is done in the menu by hitting Select > Modify > Contract.  I'm sure that in Paint Shop Pro there's something similar.  Contract your selection by 1 to 3 pixels, depending on how dramatic you want your border to be.  The above images were all done at 2 pixels, which is my standard.  Now, you have a border.  The rest is easy.  Switch your foreground and background colors with the two headed arrow icon next to the foreground/background color swatches (pretty sure PSP is similar) and now fill your new selection with white, the same way you did the black before.  Here's what that looks like:

AND NOW YOUR TEXT IS GONE!  KAPUT!   FINI!!!  MUAHAAHAHAHA!!!  YOU HAVE WALKED RIGHT INTO MY TRAP, FOOLISH MORTALS!!!!

Just kidding.  Since my text was white, of course you won't be able to see it against a white background.  This is where it pays to have Photoshop 6.  It would surprise the hell out of me if you can't do this in PSP, too, but I don't know if it's as easy.  I click on the text tool (the big T on my toolbar), and then click on each layer in my layer menu that is a text layer.  Essentially, each layer that has my dialogue in it.  When I do that, my text toolbar at the top shows me what font I used, what point size, and here's the key... what color I used on that font layer.

And just as easily, I can click on that white color swatch now, which opens a color picker dialogue, and change that to black.  Do this for all your dialogue layers.  Now, with pages full of dialogue and captions, this can get a bit repetitive.  But once you've learned how to change text colors (after the fact) on the fly in your program of choice, it becomes second nature.  And the results are worth it:

Keep in mind that this picture is still zoomed in at close to 200% so you can see, close-up, what it looks like.  At standard viewing size, it'll look a lot less pixelated and almost as smooth as what you would find on the newsstand comics.  That's the beauty of this technique... it gives you tres sweet results, like what I ended up with HERE.

Anyway, hope everyone enjoyed this foray into some of the techniques I use in making comics.  Hopefully soon I'll be able to show you even more!

But until then... I'm out!  Get to work!!

MH/AF