I need to find online tutorials on the art of placing/arranging word balloons in comics. Preferably American comics tutorials not manga tutorials. I know I've seen some excellent ones in the past, but I can't find them anymore...

This is not about "how to make word balloons via Photoshop" or "how to draw word balloons." I'm talking about the art of distance between character and balloon... when to use interconnecting balloons... where to place balloons for panel/page flow, etc.

Links! Links! Thank you!

Here's one that I found a while back. Pretty basic, but good fundamentals. Warning- it says it's going to talk more about this "next time". There is no next time.

This doesn't deal as much with placement as with traditional comic bubbles and their visual cues

Here's an article challenging the "nesting" theory of speech balloons

Those are the ones I had bookmarked... I know I've run across like, a chart or something that explains the traditional order in which bubbles ought to be laid out, read, etc... but I don't remember where. If I can think of anything else, I'll post it. :)

I'm not sure that it would help much with balloon placement, but Blambot.com has a handy article on comic grammar and balloons .

I don't really have many pointers for placing word balloons, as I've only ever picked up a couple of rules for them over the years. One is to place the word balloons in accordance with the way people read. In English (and most Western languages), people read from left to right and top to bottom. Another guideline I have is to plan where your words and balloons go before you draw any of the characters or background. That way, balloons don't collide into each other, or obstruct the faces of other characters.

I hope I helped, even a little.

That's a great article, Speck. I'm glad you pointed that out.

I haven't read much on lettering myself. I'd say the most important thing is to make sure its CLEAR what order the balloons need to be read on. I see even a lot of big-two mainstream book that are fairly vague as far as dialog order goes.

Figure left to right, top to bottom. Look it over, if there's even a slight ambiguity as to what order they go in, I'd work at re-arranging them a bit.

I also put the word balloons in my layouts so that the space is accounted for. Usually that works out for me. Sometimes I'll end up having to cover up more of a panel than I'd like.

I never really (and Nate touches on this in his article) considered how important balloons pointing to the characters MOUTH is until recently. I mean, typically, in all cases, I'd have it point to the head or mouth, but if the balloon came from a direction that wasn't convenient to to point to the head, I'd just have it point generally to the character.

That was until this: http://www.drunkduck.com/Mastorism/index.php?p=394851

When the print version got reviewed, I got called out on this page for having my character talk "quite literally out of his butt."

So I put more thought into it now.

LOL they're trans-dimensional aliens. Just using one orifice to talk all the time probably gets tiresome... They could very well be talking out of their butts!

mlai
LOL they're trans-dimensional aliens. Just using one orifice to talk all the time probably gets tiresome... They could very well be talking out of their butts!

True enough. They don't even really have mouths.

Useful links :D

Just read all of these and then went over my relettered pages to see how they hold up... and other than couple of spots where I had to cram things to fit them in most seems to work.

Campbell's rule seems to make sense too, although I approach it slightly different.
Campbell tends to draw balloons as popping through the panel border (as if they were parts of gutters that "spilled over" onto the page) ratehr than just glue it to the border itself and be done with it. So it really makes sense for him to keep these things on one level cause otherwise it'd be too easy to drop from a panel above to the one below if the word balloons would be directly connected by the white space of the border.

I did notice though that if you do a balloon that overlaps the panel and sticks out of it, the eye can easily travel in the direction it's poking through, so this can be distracting (you read first panel in first row, the blaloon is at the bottom and it breaks the border and ytou end up reading the balloons at the top of first panel of SECOND row rather than jump to second panel of FIRST row) but it can also be used to draw the eye to the right, if you make the balloon "glued" to the bottom but poking out on the right. This way the eye, while it' down in that particular panel, it also travels RIGHT to the next panel in sequence. Something like that can be useful if you need to cram the text at teh bottom of one panel and then at the top of the panel below it. You could also make sure that the panel below contains balloons that don't touch the upper panel border (even a little space will help).

But that's just me, and I'm really not the best letterer (not yet anyway) especially considering that I usually leave it for the last and often FORGET to leave room for the balloons, haha.