Bubble Placement: Reading Order

By request from commenter Sweetdeily, some thoughts on bubble placement, also known as balloon placement. There’s many aspects to this, but the most important thing is reading order, so that’s what I’ll cover today. Let’s get to it.

If you get the reading order wrong, your characters will speak out of turn and everyone will be confused. There are a number of things that readers use to guide them to the next bubble. I’ll cover two here.

1. Z-movement

Z movement is the natural path your eye takes when initially “reading” an image.
You’re probably not aware of it, but that’s how you initially approach any new image you are presented with, whether it’s a website, a film poster, a a comic book page or whatever. Your eye moves this way easily, because it’s how you read. Designers know this, and use this template to design their posters, adverts and programme windows, which in turn reinforces the standard, and so on and so forth. So your readers will (try to) follow this path when presented with your comic page, and inside individual panels.

Aside: sometimes it’s a double Z, like when you have a three tier comic page. Sometimes it’s more of an L shape, if there is nothing interesting in the upper right corner. It’s only a guide, not an absolute. That said, you should make sure that when the eye takes this path through the panel, they encounter the bubbles in order:

Don’t rely on the Z thing too much though, or you’ll end up making this common mistake (<— left). According to the Z, the larger bubble should be first. However, the eye’s starting point is the upper left corner, and both bubbles are equidistant from that point. Equidistant? Oh, yeah, that’d be point number 2.

2. Proximity

So the other thing that guides your reader’s eye is how close the next bubble is to the current one. In the example above, both bubbles are the same distance from the upper left corner, our starting point. Where do we go first? We can’t be entirely sure, and that’s why it’s a bad choice for bubble placement, unless you’re deliberately trying to confuse your reader for some annoying reason.

So how can we use proximity to guide the eye? Keeping in mind that our reader will try to stick to their Z-shaped path, we can swerve them slightly by putting two bubbles close to each other. Especially if the second bubble in the group is smaller, the reader will spot that as the next one to go to.
Of course, that only works if the bubble is close enough, and the alternatives (#3 in this example) is far away enough. If you have to wonder “hm, is that clear enough?” it probably isn’t. Because if you need a moment to think about it, your reader will need a moment to think about it, too, and you want your reader to spend absolutely no time whatsoever thinking! At least, you don’t want them thinking about where to go next. You want them thinking about your story and characters, so make the technical stuff really easy on them. It will help them enjoy your story.

Practical stuff

To close with, some quick tips about bubbling.

1. For the love of clarity, PLAN! This bubble stuff isn’t always easy, especially because you’re fitting them in around your awesome art. Draw the bubbles in when you’re doing your thumbnails or roughs or whatever you call it. Make them big enough.
2. Bubbles need tails. A lot more often than you think. Especially in manga the tail-less bubble is popular, but unless the bubble is really close to the speaker, or there is only one character who could possibly be speaking (because they’re the only person in the room, for instance) this can cause confusion. Err on the side of clarity, and give your bubble a tail. It doesn’t hurt, and can make a big difference.
3. Keep your bubbles near the person speaking. Sometimes someone speaks while they’re out of panel (off camera). That’s fine, so long as we have an easy way of telling who the speaker is. Ideally though, bubbles should be near their speakers, so they can have neat little tails and the eye doesn’t have to travel a long distance from the speech to the facial expression it goes with.
4. Don’t cross your tails. This is ugly, confusing, and just generally a sign of poor planning. Re-plan the panel so the person speaking first is on the left, or put the bubbles on top of each other, or move the second one to the bottom of the panel, or something. But don’t do this, it’s not very nice:

Right, that’s it, that’s all I got. See you next week.

Credits: The man with a pointy stick page was taken from “Money Money” by Sammy Boras and Laura McNulty. This is a short story included in Leek & Sushi’s Manga Show, one of the fine books ITCH has available for purchase. The doctor and patient are from Codename: Pepsi, a little book of nonsense I published as a limited edition special type thing. You can get these and our other publications from the web shop. Yes.

The Manga DIY series is set to continue every Wednesday for some time to come. I want to make it useful and educational to you, my reader, so please tell me what you need. Is this too basic? Too advanced? Want me to cover something in particular? Tell me about it, I listen.