How much do you consider/forget to consider your word bubble coverage?

[alaingrey]

I'm going to be alone saying this but if there's one thing I love it's considered yet awful lettering. Windsor McKay's Little Nemo comics have crazy lettering, crammed into panels and sometimes wrapping around edges and over margins and I love it. I love zines where the writing is stream of consciousness and goes all over a page. If there's anything I really dislike, it's probably vector balloons and generic comic typefaces.

My own comic relies a lot on my handwriting to give it a desperate adolescent kind of feel. I draw the balloons as part of the traditional inking stage, so I'm stuck with what I've got at the end. As a result my "font" size is all over the place. I'm sure it makes a lot of people leave my comic but I love how it looks. I think the important thing to consider is always flow and legibility no matter how clean or crazy you allow the text to get- in the end it has to serve its purpose.

[Vikiro_Hop]

I only know what the dialogue is going to be in a vague sense when I make my comics. It is literally the last thing that gets hammered out so I rarely have any idea how much text there is going to be so I don't consider it very much at all. Given that I make a simple gag comic it doesn't interfere with much, it does lead to a lot of me just trying to get things to fit right retroactively.

[dracomarl]

Dude this is awesomely helpful! I agree with you about the whole wanting a comic to be more art than text. I feel like if the bubble is too large, the comic overall feels crowded and in a way, unwelcoming because you have to struggle to see the art. I personally try to limit the number of words I write so that I can manage the bubble crowding issue as well as being sure that mobile users can properly read the text.

[TheVoidchildProject]

Jeebus, I forget this all the time. I've started using my storyboards to put in bubbles approx to what I'm going to use to make sure I don't forget.

But forgetting is only half of the problem. I've learned since Reading "Understanding Comics" how important placement is. For instance the flow of time and how if you place speech bubbles further apart, more time will appear to have passed while tightly packed speech makes dialogue seem more rapid.

I can't recommend Undetstanding Comics by Scott McCloud enough:

[eleoza]

Personally I add the bubbles + speech right after the sketch. I also don't like too many speech bubbles on a page. If there's too much text to read it's not very appealing to read in my opinion.
I think this is handy, because if a bubble happens to be bigger or smaller than I thought I can adjust the sketch to it.

Then after I just add the lineart/color/screentones

[Sho_Shonojo]

I plan out where my word bubbles are going to when I'm in the thumbnailing stage. Once I get to the point of laying out the page, I draw the panels and word bubbles at the same and get that all inked, along with the text, before I start drawing. Sometimes this can be a problem when I decide to change what's being drawn in a panel at the last minute, but otherwise it works okay. At least I know in advance how much space I have for the art.

[JessJackdaw]

Nice! Yeah, I feel like if you want to have a comic with heavy amounts of text, perhaps a comic isn't the best way to tell your story. An illustrated novel or comic prose are much better formats than tryiing to cram it all onto a tradtional comic page.

If there's anything I really dislike, it's probably vector balloons and generic comic typefaces.

...Yeah, for whatever reason thick vectory fonts mashed into a bubble really hurt my eyes. Several lines of a bold font in a perfect circle just turn me off to reading a comic.

I guess if I had a preference it would be wide bubbles with horizontal text placement. It seems more natural to read that way. That's just my honest opinion though. XD

[dracomarl]

@JessJackdaw Yeah, I feel like after a couple of sentences, you're obligated to draw another panel. Or even better, explain some of what you would otherwise write in visuals rather than text. A little bit of symbolism is always nice, so is showing what the speaker is feeling or thinking of as the monologue or whatever progresses. Just as long as the text is large and the bubble doesn't take up too much of the panel.

[CaptainUfo]

I used to have that same issue when I used good old pencils and paper. The issue wasn't much that I forgot about them, rather that I was really bad at judging how much space that amount of text actually required.
Since I started to work 100% digitally, the very first thing I do when I start a new page is to put the dialogues in.