Painting The Medium / Comic Books

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• Speech Bubbles are a ridiculously common way to do this; see entry for examples.
• One trick that's been used in a number of comics is to have pages printed sideways to indicate a change of state or perception.
  • In The Sandman (1989), it's used at one point when a character falls asleep and moves from the real world to the world of dreams.
    • Also, Dream's speech bubbles are white-on-black rather than black-on-white and have irregular borders. When another character tries to imitate Dream's voice, his speech bubbles change color, too.
    • The same applies to other important characters, especially the Endless. For example, Delirium's speech bubbles are colorful, and the font is a little... unusual, and Desire speaks in a very pretty, sharp-edged font. Only Death's font and speech bubbles are normal. Among the other characters, there are Matthew the Raven's orange speech bubbles and thin, "sticky" font, Bast's faux-Egyptian font and angels' beautiful cursive.
    • In fact, in the scene where various gods and other entities turn up to discuss what to do with the now-leaderless Hell, each of the characters involved has a unique and thematically appropriate font and bubble style.
  • In Swamp Thing, it's used when the eponymous plant-creature and his wife make love through the use of hallucinogenic tubers. No, really.
• Dave Sim of Cerebus the Aardvark fame seems quite fond of this trope — creative lettering and speech bubbles, the use of separated text and illustrations to depict Cerebus drifting through the astral plane-like Spheres in the "Mind Game" stories, and one issue in which the orientation of the panels spins every page to emphasize the protagonist's vertigo.
• JLA/Avengers: The universes are being destroyed and reformed over and over again in the last two issues, which naturally leads to a lot of this. Including one instance where Krona, stuck between the two universes, is used as the border between the panels showing the Marvel and DC universes, as well as the border between the universes itself, which has weakened to the point where the character can see each other from the opposite sides of the image. And they are separated not only by being on different universes, but by being on two separate pages of a Splash Panel.
• Fantastic Four: Season One: The four panels in succession showing the titular four gaining their powers from the cosmic radiation shows Johnny bursting into flame, Reed with odd proportions, Sue going blind because her eyes turned invisible... and Ben kneeling in pain with no visible change. However, the panel is covered in a network of irregularly-shaped hexagons that look just like the pattern of his rocky skin.
• In Y: The Last Man's Safeword arc, Yorick is drugged with hallucinogens, and the structure of the page breaks up, with the panels placed at odd angles and overlapping. The white-on-black title cards (which normally carry objective information like "Tel Aviv, Israel, Three Days Later") show things like "Where The Hell Am I?"
• An even earlier use of this (1913-1944) is the surreal Krazy Kat. At times, the characters will draw various props themselves, and one Sunday sequence emphasizing words that end in '-tion' ends with Officer Pupp hauling Ignatz to... an incomplete panel. Pupp asks Herriman if he's got 'kartoonist's kramp', while Ignatz muses on 'sweet procrastination'.
• In the Asterix stories, different fonts are used to show languages that cannot be understood by the main characters (or at least notable accents). Most obvious are the Goths, who are written in blackletter, and Egyptians, who speak entirely in hieroglyphs (that are subtitled for the reader's benefit).
  • At the beginning of Asterix and Cleopatra, which depicts a dialogue between two Egyptian characters, a footnote indicates that the scene will be dubbed for the reader's convenience and goes to explain that the movement of characters' lips doesn't fit the pronunciation of the words because dubbing techniques of the time were not sophisticated enough. Also, Obelix at one point attempts to speak Egyptian; since Egyptian is represented by hieroglyphics, his faltering efforts look like a child's drawings.
  • Curiously averted in Asterix and the Normans, where despite the fact that the Normans speak the same language as the Goths and the Scandanavians, their speech is rendered in the same font as Proto-Brittonic, Gaulish, and Latin.
  • In Asterix and the Great Crossing, Asterix and Obelix go to sea and a storm blows them to America, where they meet some Scandinavians, and måybe yøu cån guess høw their långuåge is treåted. Asterix tries to talk with them but gets nowhere, and muses that he must not be putting his ˚s and /s in the right places. The Scandinavians have a Gåulish slåve with å "hørrible åccent": his slashes are backward and his rings are rectangular.
  • In one panel of Asterix and the Secret Weapon, Obelix is doubled over with hysterical laughter, and the panel stretches out due to his body pushing the frame.
  • Other frame-using examples include Asterix leaning onto the frame for support, his hand and elbow going out of the frame. There's absolutely no wall in this place.
• In Superman: Secret Identity, almost the entire narration is formatted as if it were written on a typewriter. In the last scene, Clark makes note that the aforementioned machine finally gave out and that he's finishing his autobiography on a computer, something exemplified by the change of narration bubble format.
• Mighty Avengers #9 has several characters accidentally yanked back in time; this is shown by printing everything but the word bubbles and captions in a faux-CMYK halftone style, like the comics of the time they were transported to. In the next issue, it goes even further by adding the era's introductory caption, tiny ads at the bottom of pages, and so on.
• Daredevil: Zebediah Killgrave, the Purple Man, has occasionally had purple text used for his Compelling Voice commands. This sometimes applies to other characters' dialogue when they are being influenced by him. One example is in the Daredevil: Season One graphic novel, in which Matt's Inner Monologue is briefly interspersed with irrational purple thoughts.
• Rising Stars contains a truly rare and brilliant use of the comic medium. As the protagonists leave a character who has become a hermit because he is plagued by seeing the dead, they comment on how he will be alone when they leave. The last panel is a full right-hand page of him muttering that he'll "never be alone" while huddling in a chair. It's all normal until the reader starts to turn the page and light illuminates it from behind, causing the next page to show through and outline a host of dead people and their speech bubbles clustered all around the huddled man on the chair. The entire next page is just a white space with reversed images of people and text to bleed onto the previous page.
• In the Sin City comic Hell And Back, the protagonist is injected with a powerful hallucinogen. At this point, the normally black and white format switches to brilliant color until the hallucinations are cured.
• Maus is a story of German Jews in World War II; it depicts Germans as cats and Jews as mice, then does an extensive Deconstruction of the depiction as overly crude. At one point, the narrator enters a house which was "completely overrun by cats and dogs," and then adds, "Am I allowed to say that, or does it completely louse up the metaphor?" (The humans, at that point, were depicted as humans wearing the appropriate masks.)
• Jim Steranko was fond of this; one issue of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strange Tales) he did had Fury making his way through a booby-trapped facility. The page was laid out like a maze, requiring the reader to solve it in order to read. The panels weren't even oriented to each other, which reflected Fury's disorientation.
  • Steranko became so well-known for this that a panel in a Deadman comic (drawn by Neal Adams) features strange radiation rising from a chasm which, if looked at with the comic somewhat tilted away from the viewer, can be seen to be distorted lettering spelling out "Hey! A Jim Steranko effect!"
• In a short sci-fi story appearing in the Swedish edition of The Phantom, a group of humans are attempting to subvert an alien world so they can seize control. The only thing the aliens care about is the Thinker, a heralded being who, according to their faith, thinks the universe into existence; the humans reason that if they can sedate the Thinker with a stunner, they will reveal him as a fraud, and the resulting chaos from the revelation will make the planet easy for conquest. They succeed in the assault... and the following two pages are filled with empty frames. In the last page immediately after, The Thinker wakes up again, realizes he's forgotten what he thought about, and thinks about something else.
• In Vögelein, every character has his or her own font. These give some indication of personality or role in the story: Heinrich, dead for two hundred years, has a nostalgically old-fashioned font. Vogelein herself has a tiny, wispy text. The Duskie's is Sand and comes with a Funetik Aksent.
• Zot! features an issue dealing with Terry's lesbian urges and her dilemma of whether to confess her feelings to Pam, an open (and widely mocked) lesbian. The final page features Pam greeting Terry, only for her to shamefully walk away. Next comes a page of letters to the writer, or if you're reading the trade paperback, author commentary. Flip the page, and you see the real last page, where Terry changes her mind and rushes back down the hallway to say 'Hi' to Pam.
• Deadpool was also the only character who thought and spoke in yellow boxes or balloons, when everyone else used normal white. Now major characters like Iron Man and Spider-Man have started having their own distinct boxes and bubbles.
  • And when Deadpool starts having conversations with himself in internal monologue, he uses his trademark yellow boxes while the "other party" uses white boxes with typewriter-style text.
  • In the Daniel Way series Deadpool seems to have developed a sort of internal multiple personality disorder. Each of his personalities thinks in a different font and color.
  • I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC naturally has some fun with this when Deadpool shows up: he ponders in yellow captions how bad the stop motion animation is and asks for a better editing software.
  • Speaking of the latter bit of that first sentence, many Marvel Universe characters speak in their own specific fonts (Depending on the Writer) including the Thing and Wolverine.
  • Gwenpool's speech bubbles are pink because she's not from that dimension; when we meet her brother Teddy and later see a facsimile of her home universe, it's shown everyone there talks like that. Doctor Strange refers to it as a sort of "cosmic accent."
• A Secret Six story had the team vomiting after being poisoned by Cheshire. Deadshot is shown vomiting, with only his narration boxes, until he pulls a butler by the collar and asks if he heard what he just said. The butler says no, and Deadshot says "Good. I thought that narration was out loud."
  • Specking of Secret Six, Ragdoll has a different italic front than everyone else.
• One of the many Marvel Crossovers, The Infinity Crusade, has the main villain wanting to kill everything so no more evil happens. This involves all realities. Including ours. One panel has its own page on it, indicating the point of view of the actual reader. Then, all dimensions catch on fire. Again, the very comic book is shown, along with the reader and it all bursts into flames. Ouch. But there's hope. Turns out it was all an illusion to fool the villain. Everyone in all realities, including the reader, is said to have resisted burning to death with their mind.
• Many issues of The Spirit have the title of the story drawn into the panel. For example, the negative space created by cacti and nearby characters form the title.
  • A story by Alan Moore in issue three of Kitchen Sink's New Adventures of the Spirit features the Spirit, who had been rendered immortal in the event that led to his apparent death as Denny Colt, visiting Central City hundreds of years later, when it is a huge archaeological dig, and the story lampshades this sort of thing as a tour guide call attention to buildings shaped like the Spirit logo.
• Watchmen has a few examples.
  • Issue #5, aptly titled "Fearful Symmetry": the panel layout and the locations featured therein are completely symmetrical from beginning to end. A much more subtle example is Dr. Manhattan's unconventional perception of time. While other people only perceive their life as one moment at a time, Manhattan is fully aware of whatever has or will happen to him, even though his physical avatar exists in linear time. Keen-eyed readers will note that all of the past and future events that he mentions throughout the book are things that appear in other panels, and the only time he ever uses the word "maybe" or shows any semblance of free will at all is when discussing his plans for the future that takes place after the end of the book.
  • Rorschach's speech bubbles are raggedy-edged, and he never uses bold or italics. None of this applied until the Blaire Roche case. He doesn't talk like this out of costume, either — that's because when he's out of costume, he isn't Rorschach.
  • Manhattan speaks in blue speech balloons while everyone else's are white.
  • Scenes set in the 1940s feature irregular, cloud-like speech bubbles, which were often used during The Golden Age of Comic Books.
• In one issue of Spider-Man, an extra who is actually Captain America in disguise asks Doctor Doom how he manages to talk in all caps.
  "Silence, minion."
  • In dynamic action scenes where he's throwing around a lot of webbing, occasionally the panel borders will be represented by lines of web, helping make the action look more dynamic. An example of this is his fight with the vulture in the Season One graphic novel, which also features tiny panels enclosed in photo frames with the Onomatopoeia 'Clik' under them amid the webbing.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) seems to enjoy messing around with comic book conventions:
  • Zonic the Zone cop comes from a "perpendicular" world; he's always shown floating sideways, sometimes with his feet resting on the side of the panel. One story from Zonic's perspective was printed entirely on a 90° axis from normal.
  • In issue #50, when the Ultimate Annihilator fires and seemingly consumes Sonic and Dr. Robotnik, the color instantly drains from the page to show how everything is being utterly destroyed. The next page is almost entirely blank until a panel border and Sonic's hand appear at the bottom to show that Sonic survived.
  • In one issue, a Continuity Cavalcade in one scene causes the Clue from Ed. to grow increasingly disoriented as it has to keep popping up to inform the reader of when things happened.
  • In issue #252, Sonic alludes to events that have been retconned away (he's the only one who remembers that they happened); a Clue from Ed. comes up like usual to tell the reader when it happened only to say "STH#... wait a minute...".
• At the end of the Legion of 3 Worlds tie-in to Final Crisis, Superboy-Prime literally punches himself out of continuity. As he does so, he's reduced to inks, then pencils, then a rough layout sketch, and then nothingness. He then appears back on Earth-Prime, our Earth, where his family now fears him because they've followed his exploits in The DCU. In the end, he ends up on the official DC forums, just like the whiny, ever-complaining fanboy he's been reimagined to represent.
• One of the Judge Dredd stories in prog 2010 is told in two parts, with the second part set in 2131 and the first in 2098. The first part is done in the style of an 80s story — black and white artwork, a more cartoony art style, campier storytelling, an old-fashioned Lawgiver, and even 80s-style credits. The second part was similar to the contemporary strips.
• In The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael, scenes in the world of the living are in full color, and those in the world of the dead are black and white. Additionally, the grim reapers and their horses are drawn in a very sketchy style which contrasts with the clear, stark art of the rest of limbo; souls awaiting judgement refer to them as blurry.
• Batman:
  • Depending on the Artist, Batman has sometimes been given yellow narration boxes in a 'hand-written' font, implying perhaps that these are from his personal notes.
  • Some artists do this with Two-Face to denote which of his two personalities is speaking at the time. They tend to give Harvey normal bubbles and Two-Face either white-on-black, some other color on black, or bubbles with gritty font on an abnormal color.
  • In Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, all of the patients have different speech bubbles to indicate their personalities, the sounds of their voices, etc. For example, Clayface has muddy, goopy-looking speech bubbles and font, and the Joker has no bubbles at all, opting instead for a single line pointing to some red, scrawled text. The Dark Knight himself also has special speech bubbles - white-on-black, with a gritty-looking font.
  • Frank Quitely's 3-issue art duties on Batman and Robin (2009) frequently blend sound effects into the scene. Explosions in the shape of "BOOOOM" and when Damian gets smashed into a wall, the cracks spell out "smash", etc.
  • There is a subtle example in Batman #186 that is hard to notice without going back and looking at the earlier panels: In Joker's hideout, there are "captions" detailing what each of his goons is doing ("card game", pickpocketing practice", etc.). We know they're captions because one is half-superimposed over one of Joker's speech balloons. Except, in a later page, we see other angles of those same "captions" in the hideout. They were actually signs the whole time! The artist just made them look like captions initially, you know, for the funny.
  • One feature in issue 5 of the 2020 run of Batman: Black and White was "The Riddle". Batman chases the Riddler into an "UN MAZE" (a FUN MAZE after the F fell off the sign), and the reader has to choose Bats' actions through a Gamebook format. The trick? It's literally an un-maze. It's Unwinnable by Design. If you follow the choices given, Batman will always lose. The reader has to actively ignore the rules, and "cheat" to beat Riddler by skipping panels, represented by Batman skipping obstructions and doing things Riddler literally didn't plan for^note One path sees Batman attempt to acquire the plans for the maze itself, only to get beaten to death by The Riddler and Killer Croc. In his dying moments, he realizes that the plans make no sense, and the maze can't be solved..
  • The Batwoman villain Alice speaks with black speech bubbles and white text just to reinforce how crazy she is. The only time she uses a normal speech bubble is her last line before falling off a plane into the river: "You have our father's eyes."
• In the Brian Li Sung arc of Grendel, the margin of each page contains an excerpt from Brian's personal journal. At first it appears that only half the pages contain narrative, while the other half are just doodles, but over time the doodles are joined by scrawled phrases in a different handwriting. They're actually the handiwork of the "Grendel" in Brian, which had been taking control of his left hand while he'd been consciously making notes with his right.
• Zatanna casts her spells by speaking them backwards. In issue #23 of Countdown to Final Crisis, we meet her Earth-3 counterpart, Annataz Arataz, who speaks them upside-down. How this sounds to the other characters in the story is not explained.
  • Meta Guy Ambush Bug can see speech bubbles, and asks her why the words in hers are backwards. She runs away crying.
• Mother Panic always speaks (and thinks) in square speech bubbles with a red box behind them.
• In Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, the frame is sometimes made up of words, right-side up or otherwise. Fun to see what words are in there and you can miss some if you don't rotate the book. Also, the Happy Noodle Boy frames have smiley/frowny faces, words, or scribbles between them.
• In the crossover where Peter Parker meets Miles Morales, when in the main Marvel Universe, everyone speaks in all caps. When in the Ultimate Marvel universe they speak in the font used for most Ultimate Marvel works.
  • Continued in the second (and far more catastrophic) crossover between the two universes, Secret Wars (2015), which has each character speaking in all caps or properly capitalized depending on their universe of origin, even after finding themselves on Battleworld.
  • Later in All-New, All-Different Marvel Miles and supporting cast (who got properly integrated in the new world by Molecule Man, long story, being nice to the nigh omnipotent being pays) get the Marvel universe all caps, other refugees from Ultimate Marvel however keep their original proper capitalization (like the Maker in New Avengers (2015)).
• Sex Criminals does this in issue #3; the protagonist Suzie (who can freeze time when she orgasms) belts out a rousing chorus of "Fat-Bottom Girls" by Queen. While she sings, all of her speech balloons are covered over with yellow sticky-note squares containing a statement from Matt Fraction explaining that they wanted to include this scene due to their respect for Freddie Mercury, but were not able to contact Brian May to get the rights for the song, so they had to blank out the lyrics.
• French comic artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu loves this trope. To name just one example, "L'Origine" has a physical hole somewhere in the comic, and the figures react to the effects it causes.
• Speaking of holes, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" has eaten holes into this children comic.
• In Ultimate Fantastic Four, when Arthur Molevic is dictating, the font of his Speech Bubble changes to what he quoted earlier. Bookman Bold, size 16.
• Red Handed has a lot of this, some of which is due to Matt Kindt having a deliberately sketchy drawing style, as in the blue non-photo pencils left visible in some panels. In addition the book has parts of its story told in newspaper headlines and photos, comic strips within the story, and book covers.
• In Warren Ellis' run on Stormwatch, newly-joined team member Jenny Sparks tells her nearly century-long life story. Each era she lives through is drawn in the style of a comic strip or comic book of the time.
• Wonder Woman (Rebirth): During "Year One", Barbara Ann's attempts at speaking with Diana have odd emphasis, faded coloring and overly-large words, to represent how she's not speaking it entirely perfectly.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2020): The recap page for issue 9 has any mention of the Master of the Sun crossed out, to represent how he's supposedly been retconned out as All Just a Dream, replaced with King J-Son and Yondu the space pirate... then the recap flat-out breaks the fourth wall to tell You that there's no such thing as the Master of the Sun. Very emphatically, at that.
• Done in the final issue of Clue (2017). Following his employer's orders to "leave no witnesses", the butler begins eliminating the people who worked on the comic book. First, he kills editor Carlos Guzman, causing typographical errors in his text. Then he kills letterer Neil Uyetake, causing the Speech Bubbles to disappear. Then he kills artist Nelson Daniel, and the story continues with typewritten text...
• The Mighty Thor: The people of Asgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Svartalfheim, Nidavellir, Muspelheim, and Hel speak in a faux-archaic font called "Meanwhile Uncial" that in-universe translates into everyone speaking like they came out of a Shakespearean play.
• This trope is parodied in Zorry Kid, an Italian comic written by Benito Jacovitti that parodies Zorro. In the original series, Bernardo - Zorro's manservant - is mute; in the parody comic, Bernardo "talks" with speech bubbles that are completely blank. However, the in-universe explanation is that he's illiterate, not mute: other characters understand him just fine, but the reader cannot.

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