I need a clever solution for this. I never had to deal with mobile phones in comicsbecause my comics always played in the 1950s or 80s. But I´m writing a storywhich plays now, I put all kind of things that I obseve into it and it feels weird not to integrate people on the phone or text messages because texting is more commonnow than calling and people have their mobile in the hand all the time. I´ll not havemy characters have the mobile in the hand, but I need a clever solution for the text messageswhich looks visually pleasing.
I don't know if there is a clever way to display text messages. It's the same thing with speech bubbles. There's only so many ways you can draw a speech bubble. I wouldn't worry about whether the way you present them is clever or not. You could hand draw all the text bubbles to keep it in sync with your art or you can go for the more graphic design type of text bubbles. Whichever works for you. You can also use different colored bubbles to represent certain characters if you're changing perspectives with it.
In advance, I apologize if I'm not very helpful.
Don´t apologize, that´s helpful, the different colored bubbles make a lot of sense in the messages.That gives me the idea of having their text bubbles have their phone background.
Hmm, panel of a phone screen?or if you don't want to draw a phone screen...Speech bubble in phone screen style?
Here's how I did it...
You could put a bubble in, thats pointing to the phone, with like a chibi face of the friend and the text. That way you don't always have to draw a screen.
I've done this a couple of times and set up the conversations to look similar to Messenger with the face/icon of the person sending the message next to the text. Sometimes I show the screen of the phone or have the messages floating over normal panels with one of the characters looking at their phone. Since most people use smartphones nowadays, readers will understand that you're showing a text message conversation if you present it in a way they are familiar with.
In my comic, I used two methods- one is a more squarish bubble pointing at the phone, and other one is a phone image. With the phone image, it doesn't really look like a real message, but I wanted readers to be able to read what is on the screen Each character has a different colour of their speech bubble, so it helps a bit with clarity. And the bubble with an envelope on top is a text from a character that hasn't appeared yet, so I had to find a different way to distniguish it (hence envelope).
Thank you all for your replies, I read it all while I was on tour.It´s very inspiring and gave me some ideas how I can do it in my comic.
