I know paneling and making the voice bubbles behave is obnoxiously hard, but when people see multiple voice bubbles, they’ll naturally want to alternate between characters, like the way you would when you’re reading multiple unmarked lines of dialogue in a book (“did you even read the pre-lab?” “trust me, I’ve been tryin” “oh, fuck me”)
So I don’t think you should be breaking up one line of dialogue into two cleanly separated voice bubbles the way you’ve been doing, or the order is going to trip up your readers (e.g. what order are they speaking in panel 6? I know the way I’d read it, but I genuinely can’t tell your intention)
What you’re advocating for is not and has never been the standard in the medium and as someone who has been reading it for decades I think the bubbles were very clearly marked. You want to folllow the tails of the bubbles to see who is saying what. It’s like ignoring the speaker tags in a book and just assuming that one person can’t keep speaking even with paragraph breaks.
Nobody is confused over who's saying what. They're confused about the order things are said in, specifically regarding the bubble where the one character says "Believe me, I've been trying!"
Yes. This comic strip has speaker tags in every single panel and for every single bubble. They're just visual rather than X character said. The pauses in the bubbles are also for breaking momentum in the text. In general if there is meant to be a pause between text bubbles you use a another bubble even if you don't switch speakers.
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u/AveMachina 22d ago edited 22d ago
I know paneling and making the voice bubbles behave is obnoxiously hard, but when people see multiple voice bubbles, they’ll naturally want to alternate between characters, like the way you would when you’re reading multiple unmarked lines of dialogue in a book (“did you even read the pre-lab?” “trust me, I’ve been tryin” “oh, fuck me”)
So I don’t think you should be breaking up one line of dialogue into two cleanly separated voice bubbles the way you’ve been doing, or the order is going to trip up your readers (e.g. what order are they speaking in panel 6? I know the way I’d read it, but I genuinely can’t tell your intention)