Useful to note, thanks for the demonstration.

Okay but just what if you are used to reading manga? Last I knew that was pretty much just backwards. From Top right to left. Fuck.

If you're composing a comic in manga reading order then the panels should go right-left too. Though real manga also tends to have vertical word balloons.

I can't remember which comic it was but, I read a comic recently that was written in English but read right to left. (No doubt it was translated into English.) I found it rather interesting to read that comic.

Like the dubs vs subs, there's two camps. A lot of manga released by western publishing houses will have art mirrored or altered to make it flow in a familiar left-right style associated with most European languages. Fan translations and imports tend to maintain the original right-left layout.

Yeah. You're probably right. I do know that the artist said to read from right to left at the top(?) of the page. He/she even had arrows to show the direction to read just in case someone reading the comic couldn't read. LOL.

That sounds like Prisoner of Punch by  takataka. He has that announcement at the top of the comic.

No, it wasn't that one. I wish I could remember which comic it was. I'm sure I'll remember, one of these days.

Awesome tutorial, will keep it as a reference if I ever decide to make a comic. Congratulations for the great initiative :D

I actually learned a lot of this in elementary school. :P
I've never had a chance to with someone to make a comic have no examples to self, but it does erk me a bit when I see them out of place or used in a weird way.

This is helpful.

This was quite funny and very enlightening to read.

But is it bad that I apparently read some of the text in the wrong order, so I ended up reading them right?

It's not a 100% "readers WILL read these panels out-of-order" especially since several of the "wrong" panels are just ambiguous at best. It's supposed to highlight why this is confusing by creating a crisis of "which order do these go in".

so the second row is the most accurate way ?

Panel four is crossed balloon tails, try not to do that. The only panels that are completely unambiguous are panels 1 and 3.

Quite frankly I like 3 when it comes to multi character conversations

Eh... I find Panels 2 and 4 to be completely unambiguous as well, and also seem to complement the flow of each other better, due to the composition and context of the bubbles. "Stacked Bubbles' work when the two are being wordy, but, as seen in Panel 3, it creates an eyesore of a "Wall of Text" (Which works, if the content of the panel is to focus more on the words than the characters). Meanwhile, Panel 4's makes it clear who's speaking with the crossed tails, but it also gives a sense of urgency/interruption to the second speaker, and a sense of active 'sides'.Two people having a conversation? Go with panel #3. Two people in a verbal conflict (That may or may not be accompanying a physical one)? Panel #4 is the better layout.

In panel 2, the topmost bubble is always read first, especially if it horizontally overlaps part of the left-most panel (The reader first sees the left-most bubble, but immediately sees the top one as 'read first' before reading the text of the left-most bubble. It's a great space to put short text - such as a 'cut-off' speaker, or someone talking about something not immediately relevant. Essentially, the priority conflict there gives a sense of being 'talked over' - yeah, Top Bubble Speaker was talking first, but what he has to say isn't as important as what Left Bubble Speaker's saying.)

"In panel 2, the topmost bubble is always read first, especially if it horizontally overlaps part of the left-most panel."

I disagree, until you mentioned it, it didn't occur to me that anyone would have thought the right-most bubble would be read first, even though it's technically on top. It's so far away from the left, that I think the left still takes priority. I'll bet most people are making that assumption for this particular panel too.

Super helpful~!

Thank you so much!

This proved to be very helpful to me! Thanks so much for putting this up! ^^

I haven't thought about this before, but as soon as I read it I was like "I completely understand and agree tremendously."

awesome! ^.^ and enlightening!

I sometimes have difficulty reading comics where the focus switches between speakers in different locations communicating over a phone or IM.

Roo Girl: "I went to a new gynecologist today."
Phone: "Oh yeah? How was she?"

Phone: "I don't think I'm gonna keep her."
Wolf Girl: "Why's that?"

Roo Girl: "She asked me if female roos are upside-down like the boys are, I told her she had her hand in my pouch."
Phone: "Snrk."

Not a very well trained gynecologist was she? LOL.

Nice, So this is illustrated somewhere?

I ship them<3

They're already in a relationship~

Thanks for sharing this bit of information regarding word bubbles. Very helpful

The only panels that confused me were panels 6 & 7. I wasn't sure if I should read panel 7 before panel 6 or vice versa. Also, in panel 6 the back and forth was a bit confusing to me. I wasn't sure if I should read it back and forth or top to bottom. After re-reading it, I discovered how it should be read. But, I agree with the people who thanked you for the education. If I was an artist, I would be most definitely appreciative for this strip. It's very educational.

I should point out that panel 4 actually eased the confusion because I put in the color grouping which sorta correct the issue.

Yeah. I hadn't noticed that until you pointed it out. But, likely it was a subconscious thing to associate the background colors to the character in that color.

Even though I'm not an artist, this bit of information will be helpful if I ever decide to commission someone to turn one of my stories into a comic.

I am not confused by 4. I am smart, I eventually notice the tails and figure it out.

But I still read the left bubble first and until I get to that tail, assume it is the left character speaking. That creates a small bump in my reading, experience that is not smooth.

I find the second and forth panels to be inaccurate, because I read the top bubble first; and was easily able to distinguish cross bubbles in the 4th panel. Despite being drunk.

THANK YOU!!

I can't tell you the number of times, after reading a strip, I could point out problems with the speech balloons, simply because they didn't follow the top left - bottom right rule.

And I'm no cartoonist, or even artist.

This is actually very educational. A lot of people don't know this with text bubbles.

BTW, PANEL order is reversed in Manga, even though speech balloon order remains the same:

Speech balloons, left-right, panels, right-left.

Not how I remember it being? It's all reversed so far as I'm aware.

You can thank the internet for that. A lot of people have come up with trying to be more loyal to the original, and don't reverse the panel order in their translation, asking that the reader please adapt

Maybe the placement of the balloons, but they still read inside the balloon left to right.

Well . . . yeah

!ƨiʜɈ ǝϱnɒʜɔ oɈ ǝvɒʜ ǝW

THANK YOU!
We need to spread the word! (No pun intended)

This is nice. Thank you very much.

whenever the dialog makes no sense I go back and change read order, lol

If you need to do this (especially if it happens a lot with a particular artist), they're probably doing something wrong, like those above.

it has happened on some printed comics :S

Just because someone hires you doesn't mean you're not bad at your job and/or made a mistake.

oh, I know that error happen

That was fun!

These are excellent points about handling that necessary nuisance, word balloons. But you need to talk more about comic page staging and storytelling- For example, making the mistake of crossing the axis- That is, characters arbitrarily changing direction from panel to panel. Or keeping a balance between caption and drawing. A caption should not describe what's going on in the panel, making the drawing redundant- That was one of the big weakness' of the classic EC Comics (Harvey Kurtzman's work excepted)- A caption should complement the drawing, not overwhelm it. Drawing, word balloon(s), and caption (if any) should be a unified whole. And then there's the storytelling- Does your staging flow from panel to panel, even if you go off the grid like Will Eisner or Chris Ware. Your work is 100% professional, Rick, you really know your stuff, and it'd be interesting (and downright useful) to hear what you have to say on the subject.

There's "how to comic" books for that, and it's not as big (ubiquitous/problematic) of a problem

Granted there's some excellent books on the subject- But I'd be curious to hear an individual artist's take on the subject. Like grammar and baseball, there are certain rules to follow, but there's no one set-in-eternal-stone right way to do a comic book page. And, nobody really talks about storytelling and/or staging.

For breaking, rules have been made

But I'll grant you Picasso's "You need to know what the rules are before you can break them"

Yes. Even Jackson Pollock learned the basics before he started dribbling and flinging paint.

Yes I know there's a lot to say about all those things (and I have recently to people in private) but I limited this comic to word balloon order only because that's what's been bothering me

Understandable. There's nothing like badly placed word balloons to wreck a comic. Winsor McCay was a brilliant cartoonist, and a great letterer, too, but his word balloons always looked haphazard, scribbled in the panel where'd they fit, their placement not really thought out. Your tutorial is excellent. But again- You know your staging and storytelling, and it would be interesting and enlightening to hear your "take" on it all, why you do what you do, though maybe not right now. It really is a subject that's not talked about enough by cartoonists and illustrators, and if you're bugged by lame word balloons, inept staging and storytelling is what gets my goat big time.

Motivated by anything recent?

Love the fact that you made this rather than, say, just bitchin about it

Oh I've bitched about it, I just figured it was high time to do something constructive cause people remember that better

Amen to that. Better to light a candle (so to speak) than curse the darkness.

Darkness, my old nemesis! Foiled again!

I keep thinking of that old PEANUTS strip where Linus reads "It's better to light a single candle than curse the darkness," to Charlie Brown, while outside Lucy is yelling at the night "YOU STUPID DARKNESS!"

Great info! So true. I'm also super-happy you didn't break the 180° rule (my pet peeve, actually).

It's funny you're the second person to bring that up when I was also talking about the 180° rule to one of the people who submitted a guest strip to Housepets, maybe I should do a comic on that next

Please do!

It would coincide with this quite well. I read an otherwise good comic last month that broke the rule in order to get the balloon order correct.

Was this because of our conversation?

I actually have this conversation with a lot of people

Fair enough! =)

I feel so called out right now

This is actually quite helpful. As someone whose trying to get his own comic idea off the ground, seeing this gives me a better idea of the do's and don'ts of comic-making and illustration.

Huh. The second panel clearly gives a "Arranging balloons like this is confusing" as the first-read in that panel, because it partially overlaps the horizontal space of the left balloon, while being the top-most (meaning it's the first to read)

Also Stacked balloons (As in panels 5 and 6) say "Read each cohesive stack of balloons together top-to-bottom. The balloons are merged because we need more vertical space for the panel layout, and making it a single balloon would crowd the text too much or have too much whitespace on the edges"

Very helpful ^^

In panel #6, I keep thinking the last word ought to be "parity" rather than "priority". Silly me, I guess.

For this? I know this stuff innately, but there's a LOT of really good design stuff in Understanding Comics and Making Comics by Scott McCloud and I generally always recommend those

Another suggestion- Look up anything Will Eisner wrote on the art of comic book storytelling. I think you'll find his insights very usefull

Because you’re using examples of the bad things, it’s extremely hard to read this comic ahaha. There was also an article I read once by another artist that showed great ways to lead the reader’s eye in comics with more dynamic angles and layouts, but I can’t remember where I saw it, sadly. :/

Yes thank you!

My pet peeve about manga is, when translating it, it's not that hard to put the balloons (and panels) in regular English left-right order by flipping each page. I saw a manga comic that did that once. I don't know why that isn't done more often.

Because that ends up making everyone left-handed and all the in-panel text backwards. Not all bilateral flips are made equal!

The text isn't hard to fix, and everyone being left-handed is, I dunno, no big deal as far as I'm concerned.

Cheers Rick, I have been guilty of some of these speech balloon faux pases
I'm saving this one into my comic reference guide :) (Is your name not Bruce? That's going to cause a little confusion)

I find the second panel to be counter-intuitive and not at all the way I'd try to read it. Way I'd expect text to be ordered in this situation is like when reading anything else you read top-down left-to-right. And being aligned to the right doesn't make a line in a book come second to one below that isn't.

Whereas in my case, I'd try to read the left panel first. Being slightly higher doesn't mean as much in a comic as in a regular book. His point about reading the one closer to the top left first is absolutely valid for me and many other people.

It's not valid to me and probably a lot of people. Yet it's being called the "right" way here despite going against most other forms of Western written media.

It IS valid to me and probably even MORE people.

But why argue about it? Panel 3 above offers a simple solution that doesn't confuse anybody.

I feel like panel 2 is suggesting it's still valid for a situation where the left character speaks first, although maybe I'm reading into it too much. :V

I do agree that it's best to just have the first speaker's balloon always on top and on the left, regardless of whether they're on the right or left of the panel.

Very nice, and informative.
It's interesting that there are a lot of things people don't really think about, conventions that some people pick up naturally while others don't.

Also this reminds me that I was supposed to continue with the Housepets comic, but I darn forgot where I was. Better start from the beginning!

Huh.
It looks like I lost the game.

This is totally awesome! Thank you so much for the pointers!

That's how I read them:
Panel 2: first the left bubble, then the top right one.
Panel 5: first the connected ones one the left, then the single one on the right
Panel 6: left-right-left-right-left-right
And actually the panels in order 5-6-7 even though 5 and 7 have been connected.

Was that order intended?

I had no problem with panel 4, wasn't confusing at all, the arrangement of the bubbles brought some dynamics into the picture.

The 4th panel actually may result in that reader would stick to reading the right balloon first because it was connected to left character. That scene indeed requires flipping. Which also may be confusing in both characters are similar and they were in opposite arrangement before. Solution might be in putting second balloon on bottom right.

7 might be connected, but depending on style of comic, such connection may imply a parallel action. Or even 4th wall breach action following event in 5th panel. Latter case usully happens outside panel frames, or frame would be absent.

Oh, and _original_ manga have right to left order, either of panels and balloons, or balloons only. Translated manga usually are edited, flipped or rearranged to fit western reader.

I don't think that the scene in panel 4 needs flipping. As I said, the arrangement of the balloons implied some dynamics what can be something you want to have to support a certain scene.
At least I wouldn't think of reading the right balloon first because the character is furthermore to the left. I really actually look for the balloon, that's closest to the top left corner - even if there's another one higher like in panel 2.

I've never read any mangas, so I'm confusing any reading orders of comics by the 'weird' arrangement of panels/balloons in Japanese counterparts. ^^

Point is, wherever the mass of use cases say that something can be treated wrong, it should be amended. regardless anecdotal experience, like "I don't see the problem". In book printing, illustration, graphic novels, camera setup in movies, page mark up in newspapers, graphical user interface - result of study that works for most always goes before your personal experience (unless that personal expierence in particular industry goes long time and you became part of it, of course).

Sadly it's not rare when someone comes in, looks at something they perceive weird and say "I know how to do better, you're doing it wrong". Especially it's disastrous in case of newspapers and GUI.

I have no idea how the majority of people read the balloons and never claimed that, I can and only have said how I read them.

Very educational!

Reminds me of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics with the black panels and the verbosity.

You compressed content of entire chapter of textbook on the topic into one page XD

I usually don't do this, but

DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS!

surprised no one beat me to it.

this makes a lot of sense since most westerners read from left to right from top to bottom. Comic artists have a tough job arranging actions (picture) and text (baloons) in such a way that the eye flows from panel to panel easily. I could imagine artists use the path the eye traces through the page to place important information along that path so that the reader catches everything artists wants them to catch or hides away certain details so that they become apparent on the second reading of the book. I'm assuming that also the type of comic also has importance since one reads web-comics differently than actual physical medium.

I learned a lot thank you

The one this that comes to mind when I read this was

DONT | DEAD
OPEN | INSIDE

I'm not sure what is confusing about crossed balloon tails. I dont' create comics, so I don't need to take this to heart, but it like has never bothered me in the slightest. Perhaps there are those who do it lazy and so its harder to tell maybe? but if done properly, it seems normal instead of having a super long tail making it all the way over to the top left.

*shrugs* Sure your example seems like a good way of doing it. Not a this is way confusing.

But I am american and I've been reading normal English comics, so I understand to look for bubble first, not character.

This is really helpful.

o_o Neat! So does a wee roo in a pockit have speech bubbles over his mum, whose pockit he or she is in? Or is the reverse true?

-2Paw.

Yeah, there's lots of options for page layouts. I read dozens of issues a week and some get really creative on the page layout, ones like the recent Batwoman run get nuts.

omg Preach! u_u

Gosh, I know all this and I'm STILL guilty of it occasionally ><

Ooh, I wish I had this a few weeks ago... this will be very handy! Good stuff.

I read the "Don't cross the tails" like this: https://youtu.be/jyaLZHiJJnE?t=4s

thanks for putting this out into the world--

I find a lot of amateur comics difficult to read because they break these conventions.

Definitely educational, and entertaining. I found that a lot of those rules I just seemed to know when drawing my own comic pages. But I have sacrificed it on occasion, or just butchered it here and there. One little comic I posted here came out badly because I forced it to be one image as opposed to breaking it into two parts.

Basically, use that natural tendency to read from left to right to your advantage, and don't try to confuse the reader!

Very very helpful, thanks!

I'm only now seeing this....and I had absolutely no idea it worked like that.

Thanks for this.

Out of all the google searches to find tips on bubbles and panels, this one was the clearest. Thanks!

Also, if you ever do another- could you do one on panels themselves and how they read in general? I see a lot of comics make some very basic mistakes that breaks the 'tempo' of the page with their setups. I see a lot of trying to stagger panels to add variety or intensity, but I think you've nailed it in here- https://www.furaffinity.net/view/28068581/

This works, it works really well, and I like it enough to try it myself in the future.

But yeah, TL;DR- an example on paneling would be amazing! and the tip about a large object 'breaking up' a panel is a nice touch to detail, too. Sorry to ramble!

I don't always get it right myself! But I am putting together a panel (no pun intended) for Furry Migration where I talk about this sorta thing so thanks for letting me know what you're looking for!