Do you miss thought bubbles and narration boxes in comics?

[Rnap22]

Yes to thought bubbles. I rather get the thoughts and feeling of the characters than being told in an interview that that’s how so and so felt. Tini is famous for telling us in interviews how Betsy felt instead showing us on panel. I can say that with any bad plotting that my character was thinking this…

[HandofPrometheus]

Or mangas… Ozamu Tezuka, the most influential manga author has been at first influenced by Disney cartoons and movies.


That, I didn’t know…

Yup. My Hero Academia is a recent example.




Manga is interesting because they can have thoughts but not draw the bubbles




Or have both




I feel like comics should've never got rid of them. They were not only important to the main cast but the supporting as well.

[AppleJ]

In a word ... YES!

If I'm paying $4-5, I want it to take more than 10 minutes to read a comic.

Especially if a character is alone or we're getting a flashback, I want thought bubbles and some basic narration. It doesn't have to be Claremontian, but it goes a long way especially in characters who aren't chatty or wear a false outer mask and internalize much of their true perspective.

In a team book, I want the dialogue to be abundant. I'd even appreciate a bit of exposition.

And no, I don't want that time spent on data pages that suck me out of the story flow. Exceptions are made for the occasional map or phone chat which adds to the narrative in a fun way, but not for blocks of prose and I'm not super into the graphs. I say this as someone who LOVES a good graph. I was a science major. But I don't want it in the middle of my stories personally. At the end, sure.

[CGAR]

Honestly I think it was needed for Betsy in ALL of Excalibur because her flip flopping just made no sense some times.

So yes I miss it at times.

[Bunch of Coconuts]

Yes. Thought balloons let us know what a character was "thinking," without it having to be stated to the other characters.

We all think and don't say.

[Sutekh]

I prefer thought bubbles in a solo book. Show us what Daredevil or Spider-Man or Wolverine are thinking and feeling about stuff. But not in a team book, with a half-dozen or more characters to service, that's just clutter-y and, barring telepaths in the X-books, I don't feel like it's as useful.

Being an old-time Legion fan, where the book is set in a distant future and the setting of any given scene might be a planet we've never visited, a brief info-dump (usually framed as an 'Encyclopedia Galactica' entry, back in the day) in a narration box is utterly crucial. I don't want somebody cast in the role of Exposition Lad and talky-talking all sorts of background information about the location. Similarly, I find the information pages in this Age of Krakoa to be fun and informative, in many cases (and a complete waste of a page, in others...).

So, it really depends. Some stories are set in very familiar places, like a Spider-Man tale in the middle of Manhattan or Daredevil tale in Hell's Kitchen, and I don't need narration boxes telling me about the place. Others are set in places like Atlantis or Olympia or Asgard or Themiscrya, and I might not know some immediately relevant detail that's going to be kinda crucial to the upcoming scene, and would rather read about it in a text box, than have Thor just sort of randomly start telling his goats about the political structure of Nifleheim for no damn reason.

[Zelena]

Yup. My Hero Academia is a recent example.

Manga is interesting because they can have thoughts but not draw the bubbles

Or have both

Thanks for the insight.

Yes, mangas can be very creative with the langage of comics… Like with onomatopeias… which are almost completely lost with the translation.

[Proxy]

I really miss thought bubbles, it was so interesting to see the inner thoughts of a character. Their thoughts could add more depth and nuance to their personalities and the story overall, especially when thoughts could be in conflict with actions.
The alternative can now feel odd (not quite how people speak to each other) and robotic, long monologues of one character talking at another or openly announcing all their thoughts and feelings to a room with no relevance to progressing the plot and with no follow up conversations. And some characters do or say something that feels out of character or you wonder what possessed them to go that route and we can’t see there’re inner workings anymore.

[Sutekh]

I really miss thought bubbles, it was so interesting to see the inner thoughts of a character. Their thoughts could add more depth and nuance to their personalities and the story overall, especially when thoughts could be in conflict with actions.
The alternative can now feel odd (not quite how people speak to each other) and robotic, long monologues of one character talking at another or openly announcing all their thoughts and feelings to a room with no relevance to progressing the plot and with no follow up conversations. And some characters do or say something that feels out of character or you wonder what possessed them to go that route and we can’t see there’re inner workings anymore.

It certainly painted a different perspective of characters like Scott Summers, who has a very different 'inner life' full of doubts and recriminations and self-blame, as opposed to the cool confident leader-y exterior he portrays, which can come across as stiff or even a bit Gary Stu-ish.

Other characters, we got less look at their 'inner life,' to the point, it sometimes seemed like they didn't have one and were all surface and no depth... (Banshee, Angel, etc. mostly characters that Claremont didn't use often.)

With other characters, there can be narrative reasons *not* to see their thoughts. As long as their was deliberate doubts about a character new to the group, like Rogue or Gambit or Psylocke or Ilyanna or Joseph, one of those conveniently-resistant-to-telepathy-for-no-damn-reason-other-than-cheap-'are-they-a-secret-bad-guy?'-drama, then it makes some sense to *not* show their thoughts.

[ERON]

I didn't realize how much I missed thought bubbles until I went back and read some early appearances of the Serpent Society in Mark Gruenwald's Captain America run. He used thought bubbles to give insight into the personalities of nearly every member of the Society, fleshing them out into three-dimensional characters instead of expendable mooks. Contrast that with more modern appearances where Sidewinder gets most of the lines and the others just stand around looking menacing. It's no wonder older fans tend to get upset when characters like those are used as cannon fodder, while newer fans are unfazed - older fans got to know the inner thoughts and feelings of those characters, while newer fans only knew them as random background characters.

[jwatson]

The X-Cellent 2 has a lot of X-cellent captions like "Joe Bomber, who use to blow up his neighbors cats."

[Rufio]

I do miss the thought and narration bubbles. They gave you inside into the characters and story.

Would love for them to make a come back.

[PyroFN]

No. I don't miss the thought bubbles...at all. Speak it. Don't think it.
Yes. I miss the narration boxes...somewhat. Some writers/artists need to be very clear about what they're trying to say/show.

General disagreement. As humans, we commonly repress a lot of our thoughts. It would not make a lick of sense for someone to say this out loud to themself or someone else:



Some monologues are necessary with thought bubbles because of the character moments that can’t be spoken aloud. We could simply leave the panel silent with Jean’s expression, but that wouldn’t speak of Jean’s inner conflict about Scott, it would give the impression she is either angry or confused about either Scott or the monsters. So much would needed to change to exactly convey what just this one page conveys.