Speech balloon

Meaning

A speech balloon is the graphic element in a webtoon that holds speech and thought. Its shape is its grammar. A solid oval is spoken aloud; a dotted or cloud-shaped balloon is inner thought; a jagged border is a shout or a machine voice; a tailless rectangle is narration; a tail pointing off-panel means someone outside the frame is speaking. Sound effects (onomatopoeia) are drawn directly on the art without a balloon. A novel's quoted dialogue and narrated prose split into these balloon types in a webtoon.

Why it matters

Balloons are a webtoon's reading-speed regulator and its physical limit on length. On a vertical phone screen, two balloons per panel and two lines per balloon is the ceiling of readability. Beyond that, readers scroll without reading. This physical limit is why 80 percent of dialogue vanishes when a web novel becomes a webtoon. The lines that survive are the ones that reveal character or move the event. The rest migrates into expression, composition and gaps. Balloon order is grammar too. In vertical scroll the reader goes top to bottom, and left to right at the same height, so the balloon of whoever speaks first must sit higher. Misplaced balloons make the conversation read in the wrong order.

Example

Novel dialogue: "If you go alone I'll walk there behind you. That's more dangerous. So give me the keys." Doyun said nothing for a long time. Then he tossed the keys. "You only drive."

Balloon breakdown:

• Panel A — Yuri (solid, upper): "Give me the keys." / Yuri (solid, lower, small): "If you go alone I'll walk behind you."
• Panel B — Doyun's face. No balloon. (No thought balloon either; expression does it.)
• Panel C — The keys in mid-air. SFX: "whip." No balloon.
• Panel D — Doyun (solid, small): "You only drive."

Three sentences of dialogue shrank to two lines, and "said nothing for a long time" became balloon-free panel B. Panels without balloons outnumber panels with them. That is a webtoon's normal ratio.

Common mistakes

• Three or more lines in one balloon. It will not be read. Cut the sentence or split into two panels.
• Moving the novel's interior into thought balloons. A webtoon full of thought balloons is a novel read aloud in pictures. Three or four per episode is the ceiling.
• Leaving balloon order to the artist. Who speaks first belongs in the writer's conti.