Speech Bubbles/Playing With
Basic Trope: Floating shapes with text or images appear when characters speak.
- Straight: When someone talks or thinks, a speech bubble appears over his/her head with a text.
- Exaggerated: The narration and characters discuss and comment on everything that happens in the comic to the point entire panels consist of nothing but speech bubbles.
- Justified: Characters in the series have trouble communicating (language barrier, outer space, muteness, etc) and they've invented floating billboards as a means of communication.
- Inverted: A white circle is talking and has a human with text in it appearing on its head.
- Subverted: Alice and Bob are talking, but what they say is not shown to the audience.
- Double Subverted: The concluding remarks of the conversation appear in speech bubbles.
- Parodied: As Bob is talking, Charlie takes out a marker and writes something embarrassing in Bob's speech bubble.
- Deconstructed: Instead of using Speech Bubbles the artist uses Rebus Bubbles. The comic has empty speech bubbles so the reader can write the story. Every panel is a Wall of Text with a little cut-out window showing the story's events,
- Reconstructed: The artist uses speech bubbles as an organic part of the art and narrative, using the shape, color and font to convey information.
- Zig Zagged: Some panels have speech bubbles, others don't.
- Averted: The comic does not have any dialogue.
- Enforced: Speech bubbles provide an effective contrasting backdrop for words, making them the typical method of showing speech, thought and narration in sequential art.
- Lampshaded: Characters snarkily comment that the Big Bad's black and red Speech Bubble is tacky.
- Invoked: Bob writes embarrassing things on a speech bubble cut-out and pastes it on a picture of Charlie, or on a wall he is standing in front of.
- Exploited: Bob doesn't understand German, so he reads Hans' speech ballon and writes it into a translator program.
- Defied: The author/artist write on the bottom or margins, they use an audio track, or have a completely silent story.
- Bob doesn't want the reader's to hear his conversations, so he dumps ink over any speech balloon.
- Discussed: "I wonder what happens to old speech ballons? You think they just vanish or get recycled by balloon fairies?"
- Conversed: "Wow! Look at those gorgeous speech balloon in this Show Within a Show!" "Yeah, but they're too artsy to read quickly."
- Played For Drama: Bob has been trying to tell Alice that he's in love with her, but Alice is unfortunately blind, and cannot see the floating speech bubbles containing his fiery Love Confession.
- Played for Laughs: The speech bubbles are physical objects that consistently get in the way of the action or are used as flotation devices in the event of a crash.
- Back to Speech Bubbles