comic-lettering-and-balloons

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Tail discipline: tails point to the speaker's mouth level, take the shortest believable path, never cross panel borders, other balloons, or a face.
4. 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.
5. 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

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The reader hears with their eyes. Letter like it.