More pictures and conversations

[shewhomust]

samarcand and I boast that when we get to talking about comics we can clear a room in 90 seconds flat. We don't have the "Who would win in a fight between the Hulk and the Thing?" debates, but start us on favourite letterers...

The criticism that really works for me is the study of detail, because the specifics of the text are in the details which add up to the whole (it takes me longer to see pattern and structure, but I get there eventually); that's what I liked about Douglas Wolk's book Reading Comics.

No sooner have I posted on that subject than along comes another conversation I'd have loved to hear: Eddie Campbell and Bryan Talbot disagreeing about speech balloons.

Comments

[cellio]

Hey, these details matter. I don't read enough comic books to have favorite (or anti-favorite) letterers, but there have been books I otherwise would have read but didn't because I found the lettering too difficult.

The question of whether baloons represent actual speech has tripped me up sometimes because there is so much variation. To go to familiar newspaper comics, we know that Snoopy doesn't literally speak because Schultz made a point of using thought baloons, but to this day I do not know if we are to understand that Garfield literally speaks. (We never see Jon respond clearly, unlike the human in Get Fuzzy, who clearly hears the words the cat and dog say.)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

You have the perfect icon for that comment: I love the way Watterson gives you sometimes Calvin's point of view (with Hobbes as a big live animal), sometimes everyone else's (small soft toy). But which is true?

[cellio]

Oh, by the way -- that discussion of speech baloons? I thought the objection was going to be completely different: the speech balloon should not include the labels for who's speaking.