They're so smart, they're telepathic...

By Brett McLaughlin

I received an interesting mail today, on something I'd almost forgotten about:

There's one thing I find really distracting. All of your speech balloons use a string of circles to connect the speaker to the words. If you buy any comic book off the shelf in the USA you'll see that this means the words aren't being spoken, they are being thought.

Here's my reply, for those who have noticed the same thing...

Believe you me, I know. I'm actually a bit of a comic book junkie, having been an X-Men nut most of my teenage years, and am now back into it. Unfortunately, the series was originated in that style -- the thought bubble style.

About a year ago, I did some work on prototyping real speech bubbles. We got into a long discussion, and looked at several options:

• Go to all speech bubbles. The big problem here is that some are indeed thoughts, not spoken words.
• Use both, speech for speech and thought for thought. This sounds good until I laid a bunch of pages out. It looked awful. Confusing pages, jumbled layouts... it wasn't good.
• Stick with what we've got. Inertia won. Everyone was used to seeing it one way -- our oldest and most loyal readers -- and we didn't want to change without a really good feeling about the destination. I never got that good feeling :-(

So sorry 'bout that. I notice it myself all the time (the bubbles are also cloudy, which is more often thought). I'd tell you to blame the series creators, but that's not very nice :-)

But the best part of this mail was something I've saved for last. At the very bottom, the mailer said this:

You probably already know this by now, but I just wanted you to know that I'm going to assume all your characters are telepathic from now on.

I love it! So that's what I'm going with. Everyone in a Head First book is telepathic. Long live the X-Men!

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