Narritive Devices

I'm defining narrative devices as something that conveys story in a comic book besides the art. Speech bubbles, thought bubbles, first and third person narrative captions, etc.

I love when letterers make a speech bubble unique to a character like what Todd Klein did with Neil Gaiman's Sandman and especially Tom Orzechowski's early Spawn work.

Also, when was the last time you saw a third party narrator or thought bubbles (the fluffy cloud version, not square captions)? For me, I surprisingly found the former in the opening arc of Uncanny Avengers. I saw the latter was used one in an issue of Sonic Universe. It was also used in Multiversity: Ultra Comics but the meta protagonist switched over to narrative captions.

Yeah, thought balloons have kind of fallen out of favor (as with most things, blame Alan Moore and Frank Miller). Brian Michael Bendis used them for a little while, in Avengers, to indicate a charater's sudden flash of thought or emotion, rather than the inner monologue thought balloons are traditionally used for.

eh, i don't feel that bad about them being gone. i like comics that rely on the art to tell as much of the story as possible - the long pretentious narration in some superhero comics is a big turn-off for me. not that they're inherently bad or always unenjoyable/the wrong choice for a given comic, just not what i would personally do if i were writing/drawing my own comic.

edited 12th Apr '15 4:32:04 PM by wehrmacht

Check out the work of Bob Byrne. He writes comics without a single thought or speech bubble; absolutely everything is done through the art. It's fantastic.

Last thought balloon I saw was in a Durham Red story, the most recent one actually. It was just a normal thought bubble, and I was rather surprised that it didn't just use a caption box.

I see thought bubbles more in webcomics and manga than I do comics these days. I think Fables might have a few?

Spider-Man of 2099 uses thought balloons in contrast to the narrative boxes used by the other characters in Superior Spider-Man. It's common enough it must be a deliberate choice, possibly because he originated in an era when thought balloons were relatively common.