Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Thoughts on thought balloons

Has anybody else noticed that we don't really see thought balloons from anyone but telepaths anymore?

It seems to me that in the olden days we saw almost as many thought balloons as we did word balloons. Nowadays we just don't seem to be privy to people's thoughts anymore. Is this a conscious decision to make the players more mysterious? Is it company wide? Industry wide? Or just Legion wide? I don't really read anything but Legion anymore, so it's hard for me to judge.

Bring back thought balloons! Oz has spoken!

There's the trendy one-color-per-character narrative box in a lot of JLA/JSA titles. Very annoying to those among us who are color-blind.

When I think of massive thought ballons, I think of ...
SUPER-PETS.

Are you sure we want to do this, Jim?

I think it was on A Trout in the Milk (although it may have been somewhere else) that I came across the notion that, if it was still the convention in comics to use thought balloons, Civil War would have been impossible. Because the character portrayals would completely fall apart if we could actually read whatever they must have been thinking.

They've been on the decline since the 80s. Caption boxes with internal monologues are the more common vehicle nowadays.

Thought balloons are probably akin to the old "asides" in the theater - a device that worked in its day but no longer seem plausible to current tastes.

using them and having to use them are two different things.


Lad Boy is correct about the use of thought boxes in the new JLA and I think they also use them in the Superman/Batman book (aka World's Finest)

I liked the thought balloons. It was easier for characters to be truly devious, and for readers to know it. Also, characters could think stuff that they would never say out loud. For some reason, the color-coded boxes don't have the same impact.

Whether thought balloons or captions, I wholeheartedly support their use.

From the writer's point of view, I can imagine a couple of reasons to use or not use them.

If you think it's a better testament to your writing skill to convey a character's thoughts through their dialogue and action, you might consider it a cop-out to use balloons that simply tell folks what the character is thinking.

Alternately, without thought balloons, you don't have to worry about what the character is thinking. They're just dialogue-sources that can move along your plot.

Personally, I think less than 30 pages a month of 20-or-so characters is a prime situation that calls for some indications of what the characters are thinking.

"HA! Little do these fools suspect that I am going to betray them all!"

I don't mind thought balloons at all.

I recall one oft-repeated criticism of the so-called "Archie" Legion was that the writers used thought balloons too much.

I think they can be used, but they can also become a crutch for the lazy, and prone to melodrama as Quis illustrates.

As something of an artist, I'm more interested in a panel showing us emotions rather than an expositional short-cut.

So I can't really say I miss them.

I do. The lack of them tends to lead to chracters saying things out loud that normaly wouldn't be spoken. Of course, anything can be overdone.

>:-( "They're falling into my trap, bwa-ha-ha."

Sometimes the art's just not up to expressing the emotions clear enough. I've always appreciated not putting any restrictions on the story telling, let the writers write.

Like any other literary tool, I feel it can be used for good or ill effect. Back in the day, it was use for a lot of needless exposition, but by the same token, people are also grumbling about comics taking forever to tell a story partly because they're relying much more on the visual cues. Narrative captions seem to be the more accepted way of peering into a character's thoughts during a story these days. I think thought balloons can still be used well to move a story along, or to give an added layer to the storytelling.

I think that many of today's creators think of thought ballons as very Silver-Agey, an old school device/crutch that looks clumsy and old fashioned on the page. I personally haven't seen any new technique that has convincingly taken the place of thought balloons though. One of those, if it wasn't broke why'd you fix it deals. I'd be interested to hear Barry Kitson's opinion on thought balloons.