| name | comic-lettering-and-balloons |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| category | comic-core |
| description | The craft contract for balloons, captions, tails, and lettering — taxonomy, placement law, reading-order rules, and per-style deltas. Bubbles hide art and order the reader's ear; this skill makes both deliberate. |
Comic Lettering & Balloons
Core principle: A balloon is a camera decision and a timing decision wearing a text costume. Placement, shape, and order are directed — never left to chance.
The quality gates already police text quantity (Layer 5). This skill supplies the missing positive craft: what good balloons are and where they live.
When to Use
- During Director shot planning (the
dialogue block of every shot plan)
- When a panel's text placement hides key art or breaks reading order
- When defining a style skill's
Dialogue & Lettering section (state deltas from this contract)
Balloon Taxonomy
| Type | Shape Grammar | Use For | Default Limit |
|---|
| Speech | Smooth oval, single pointed tail | Spoken lines | ≤2 per panel |
| Thought | Cloud edge, bubble-chain tail | Interior voice | ≤1 per panel |
| Whisper | Dashed outline | Secrets, asides | Rare; counts as speech |
| Burst/Shout | Spiked outline | Yelled lines, alarm | ≤1 per strip; must be earned by the beat |
| Caption box | Rectangle, no tail | Narration/time stamps | Forbidden by default; permitted only where a style or format explicitly allows (e.g., autobio-indie-literary-comic, single-panel-gag) |
| Off-panel | Tail points to panel edge | Unseen speaker | ≤1 per strip; the reveal must pay it off |
Placement Law
- Dead-zone rule: balloons live in compositional dead zones — sky, walls, negative space. Never over faces, hands, the inciting prop, or the panel's focal point.
- Reserve the zone in the shot plan: the Director stages each panel with balloon space already budgeted; lettering squeezed in after staging is a planning failure.
- Tail discipline: tails point to the speaker's mouth level, take the shortest believable path, never cross panel borders, other balloons, or a face.
- Margin law: text padding inside the balloon ~20% of balloon width; balloons never touch panel borders (minimum one line-width gap) and never overlap the gutter unless the style sanctions border breaks.
- Stacking: when two balloons share a panel, the first-read balloon sits higher and/or further toward the reading-direction origin; joined balloons (same speaker) connect with a short bridge, not a shared outline.
Reading-Order Rules
- LTR formats: first balloon top-left region, conversation descends left→right; a reply must never sit left of (or above) its prompt.
- RTL (manga-family lock): mirror everything — first balloon top-right; tails and eyelines obey the mirrored flow.
- Vertical scroll: one balloon zone per panel; dialogue order = scroll order; never two balloons side-by-side competing for the same scroll moment.
- The order test: cover the art; read only balloons in position order. If the conversation still makes sense, order passes.
Text Budget (Inherited by All Styles)
- ≤ ~8 words per balloon; ≤ 2 balloons per panel (taxonomy limits above are stricter for special types)
- One panel per strip should carry no text — silence is part of the lettering plan
- Hyphenation forbidden; line breaks at phrase boundaries; ALL-CAPS only where the style's lettering tradition uses it
Lettering Feel by Style Family (Deltas Live in Each Style Skill)
| Family | Default Feel |
|---|
| Manga-family | Hand-lettered, rounded; small katakana-flavored SFX where sanctioned |
| Newspaper/cartoon | Confident hand-caps, uniform weight |
| Painted/prestige | Set-apart formal lettering; restrained caption styling where allowed |
| Zine/underground | Wobbly hand-letters; ransom-note energy sanctioned |
| Minimalist | Typewriter-plain, small, generous air |
SFX Policy
- Default: no sound effects (universal rule). Styles that sanction SFX must cap count (typically 1 per strip) and bind SFX to the inciting action, not decoration
- SFX are drawn as art (integrated perspective and overlap), never pasted flat text
Failure Modes to Catch
- Balloon covers the expression that carries the beat (the #1 lettering failure)
- Reply-before-prompt order inversion at a glance
- Tail crossing a border or pointing at the wrong character
- Burst balloon on a quiet beat (tone mismatch)
- Caption sneaking into a style that forbids it
Integration
- The Director's shot plan
dialogue.placement field is governed by this contract
comic-quality-gates Layer 5 checks quantity; this skill defines the placement/ordering checks the Director applies in the flow-first final cut- Style skills inherit this contract and state only their deltas in
Dialogue & Lettering
The reader hears with their eyes. Letter like it.
