Painting The Medium / Comic Strips

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• Bloom County was also fond of this: for instance, on one occasion a dangling participle fell out of its speech bubble and whacked the speaker in the head.
• Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson occasionally used different fonts in word balloons, most frequently when the bully Moe was speaking (in crudely lettered lowercase, suggesting brutishness and stupidity).
• Dilbert once receives a convict serving prison time into his home. The prisoner complains about how cramped it is in Dilbert's house. The speech balloon of the prisoners complaint in this panel obscures Dilbert from view.
• In Doonesbury, Dan Quayle's word balloons frequently contained spelling errors, a reference to the infamous incident wherein he told school children that "potato" was spelled "potatoe".
• FoxTrot by Bill Amend is somewhat fond of this too. One comic had Peter sitting in a chair, and his mother, Andy, apparently chewing him out. Oddly, her speech bubbles had tiny, unreadable text, despite the bubbles being normal size. The last panel is Andy ripping off his previously hidden earphones. "—and take off those stupid headphones!"
  • One strip had Jason walking around and showing people how good he was at juggling knives. Everyone seems oddly unimpressed by this feat, and it isn't until the last panel that we see he isn't juggling at all. The knives have been taped to a piece of plexiglass, which he is just carrying around. Obvious to everyone in-universe, who would note that the knives aren't moving, but surprising to us.
• This Frazz strip, in which the title character is literally painting the medium.
• Here's an example of Painting The Medium from the comic strip Liō.
• Madam & Eve does it in this strip◊ with a high-tech twist.
• This Non Sequitur strip.
• Pearls Before Swine is very fond of this. One Sunday comic strip featured Pig running to the end of the panel causing the color to go entirely off-base. Another series had the characters actually sit on top if their own panels.
  • The adult male crocodiles also speak in mixed-case letters, while the smarter (female and child) crocodiles speak in capital letters.
  • Don't forget this classic, where the falling copyright letters interrupt Pig's reply to Rat and prompts the latter to quip "That's one for the blooper reel."
• Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Marigold can tell Phoebe's not pronouncing "The Shield of Boringness" in a properly dramatic fashion because of the font being used.
• One of the earlier uses of this was in 1950s strip Pogo, which had one regular who spoke in gothic type to indicate his pomposity. Guests also often had their own font styles. Note that not only did Pogo not use computer fonts, it wasn't typeset, either. Those baroque, elaborate word balloons were lettered by hand.
• Sweet Tooth: Jeff Lemire was very fond of experimenting in various issues, including telling two simultaneous stories, which were separated by one story not having any dialogue while the other did, making a storybook type issue by not having any speech bubbles and having the issue presented sideways, and changing his art style to indicate dream sequences.
• "Upside-Downs" by Gustave Verbeek. He was limited to six panels in the newspaper...and had the wacky idea to let the comic make (another) sense when held upside-down, to double the length of the story. It works...and it is awesome.
• One early issue of Dragon Magazine featured inexplicable drawings of small cartoon dragons saying "Growf!" on every dozen or so pages. The reason became clear in that issue's What's New? with Phil and Dixie comic, in which Phil attempts to extinguish the flames of a similar small dragon with a firehose, only to discover that this particular sort of dragon spontaneously replicates when wet, a la Gremlins.
• Zits uses tons of visual gymnastics, as one of its creators may have even called it, to convey some of the realities involved in raising teenagers. In one of them, Connie tries having a conversation with her son Jeremy just after he's gotten up and come down for breakfast. He speaks in barely a mumble, but what he says is displayed at the bottom of each panel as if they were subtitles on a DVD. Jeremy's father Walt concludes, "Every teenager should come with subtitles."

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