Comic Lettering Basics: Balloons, Tails, Captions and SFX

Lettering is the part of a comic readers notice only when it goes wrong. A balloon in the wrong place makes two characters' lines read out of order. A tail pointing at the wrong head gives a line to the wrong speaker. A panel stuffed with words buries the drawing. Good lettering is invisible: it carries the reader's eye through the page in the order the writer intended.

You do not need to be a professional letterer to learn the basics, and if you write scripts, you should. Many lettering problems start in the script, long before anyone places a balloon.

Reading order

In English-language comics, readers move left to right, top to bottom, inside each panel and across the page. The first balloon read in a panel is the one highest and furthest left. The next is to its right or below it.

That one rule drives most balloon placement:

The first speaker should usually be on the left of the panel, so their balloon can sit upper left.
Balloons stack in a stepped diagonal, upper left to lower right, so the eye follows a clear path.
Never place a later balloon higher and further left than an earlier one. Readers will read it first.

Manga, and comics in other right-to-left reading traditions, reverse this: pages and panels read right to left, so the first balloon sits upper right. Japanese editions often letter text vertically inside tall, narrow balloons. If you are adapting or making work in that tradition, flip every placement rule here horizontally.

Balloon placement

Balloons go in the parts of a panel where they cover the least important art. Usually that means sky, walls, ceilings, or empty space above characters' heads. Avoid covering faces, hands doing something important, and anything the story needs the reader to see.

A few placement habits:

Keep balloons near their speakers so the tail stays short. Long tails snake across the art and get confused with other tails.
Do not cross tails. If two speakers' tails would cross, the staging is wrong for the dialogue order. Fix it in the script or the layout.
Use connected balloons for one speaker's consecutive lines with a pause between them. Two small balloons joined by a short bridge read as one beat with a breath in the middle.
Balloons can break panel borders when space is tight or to link panels, but do it on purpose, not as an accident of crowding.

Tails

The tail is the pointer that tells the reader who is talking. Point it toward the speaker's mouth, not just their general direction. If two characters stand close together, a tail aimed at the shoulder between them is ambiguous.

Off-panel speakers get a tail that runs to the panel border in the direction of the speaker, sometimes with a slight break at the border.
Characters speaking from inside a building or vehicle can have a tail that points at the window or door.
Characters with no visible mouth (a robot, a mask, a voice in the dark) still get a tail aimed at where the sound comes from.

Balloon types

Most comics use a small vocabulary of balloon shapes. Each one tells the reader how a line sounds before they read it.

Speech. An oval or rounded rectangle with a pointed tail. The default.
Thought. A cloud shape with a trail of small bubbles instead of a tail. Thought balloons have become less common in many modern comics, where captions often carry inner voice instead, but they are still used, especially in comedy and all-ages work.
Whisper. A dashed or dotted outline, often with smaller or lighter text. Signals quiet without the reader needing to be told.
Shout. A spiky or burst outline, often with larger or bolder text.
Radio, phone or electronic. A jagged outline or a lightning-bolt tail, sometimes a squared-off balloon. Tells the reader the voice is coming through a device.
Weak or dying. A wavering outline, sometimes with small or shaky text.

Keep your vocabulary consistent within a book. If whispers use dashed outlines on page three, they should on page ninety too.

Captions

Captions are boxes, usually rectangular, with no tail. They carry text that is not spoken aloud in the scene.

Location and time captions (The harbor. Three days later.) orient the reader at a scene change. Keep them short and put them in the top left of the first panel.
Narration captions carry a narrator's voice, which may or may not be a character in the scene.
First-person captions carry a character's inner voice. When a book has several characters narrating, many letterers give each one a distinct caption color or style so readers can tell them apart without a name tag.

Captions follow the same reading order as balloons. A caption at the bottom of a panel is read last.

Sound effects as art

Sound effects (SFX) are part of the drawing more than they are part of the text. They can be huge or tiny, warped, angled, layered behind objects, or broken by the action. A door slam might be thick blocky letters shaking at the edges; a dripping tap might be a small lowercase "plik" tucked beside it.

In the script, the writer names the sound. How it looks is usually a call for the artist or letterer. Some artists draw SFX into the art directly. Others leave them to the letterer. Agree on this early.

Use SFX for sounds that add something: a sound happening off-panel, a sound that tells us something we cannot see, or an impact that needs weight. Leave out sounds that are already obvious from the art.

Emphasis and type

Traditional comic lettering is all caps, and many books still use it, though mixed case has become common, and conventions vary by publisher and genre. Within either style, bold marks the stressed word in a line, the way a speaker would lean on it:

MARA: I told you NOT to open it.

Rendered on the page, NOT would appear in bold. Use emphasis to show how a line sounds, not to decorate it. If three words in every balloon are bold, none of them stand out. In the script, writers often mark emphasis with bold, underline or caps, depending on what the letterer prefers.

Word density

Every word takes space away from the art. As rough rules of thumb that vary by format, many teams aim for about 25 words or fewer per balloon, two or three balloons per panel, and a page total that rarely goes past about 200 words. Small panels in a nine-panel grid hold much less.

If the words will not fit:

Cut filler. "Well, I mean, I suppose" can usually go.
Split a long speech across two panels.
Move exposition to a caption at a scene change where there is room.
Ask whether the art already says it.

The guide to panel layouts and pacing shows how dense pages and small panels change the reading speed, which matters when you decide where the wordy scenes go.

Leaving room in the art

Artists who know the script will leave space for balloons: an empty patch of sky, a ceiling, a wall behind the speakers. If the art is drawn without this, the letterer ends up covering something. Helpful habits for the team:

The artist roughs in balloon positions on the layouts before inking.
The writer orders speakers left to right in panel descriptions, matching the dialogue order.
Anyone who notices a panel with no room flags it early, when moving a figure is cheap.

Lettering starts in the script

Most lettering problems can be prevented at the script stage. When you write a comic script, you can:

Tag every line with a speaker and a modifier like (OFF), (WHISPER) or (RADIO).
Give each balloon its own line so the letterer knows where breaks go.
Count words per panel and per page before sending.
Note any caption style that belongs to a specific narrator.
Write dialogue in the order it should be read, and stage the speakers to match.

Vertical scrolling comics follow most of these rules but give you more space between panels and different constraints on balloon width. The comparison of webtoon and print comics covers that format.

Lettering in Aevon

Aevon's Comic Studio lets you place lettering balloons directly on your pages: speech balloons, thought balloons and captions. Because the script and the pages are kept in sync, the lines you wrote in the script are the lines you letter on the page, rather than text you copy from one file to another and risk getting out of step.

You can place art into panels and then position balloons around it, which makes it easy to see when a panel has no room or when a speaker on the right is talking first. The guided read mode steps through panels one at a time, a useful check that balloons read in the order you meant. Comic Studio's pacing suggestions are a second check on pages that may be carrying too much.

When the lettering is done, export from Comic Studio to PDF or CBZ for print and digital comics, or to a vertical webtoon strip. Aevon is free to use on the web, desktop and Android.