A query from regular reader Andy Sleeper on the 15th, about conventions in the comics. Andy reported on two cases where he’d seen flanking punctuation used to indicate that what was inside the punctuation was spoken in a language other than English. Andy wondered (a) whether this was an established practice in comics, and (b) whether artists have tried to use other means to solve this problem in their work.
I have to confess that I don’t know the answer to either of these questions, though I’ve spent some time looking around. So now I throw the questions open to the world, hoping that someone will know things I don’t.
Andy’s first example, from a 2010 Doonesbury:
(#1)
Here, speech in Pashto is reported in English (awkward when the Pashto is awkward) inside parentheses ( ).
Andy’s second example, from K. B. Spangler’s A Girl and Her Fed of 6/22/15:
(#2)
Here, speech in Japanese is reported (in English translation) within angle brackets < >. (It’s a long story, with a lot of speech in Japanese.)
June 24, 2015 at 8:26 am |
It’s probably the most common way of marking speech in different languages in comics. See, for instance, this Beto Hernandez page from a 1991 issue of Love & Rockets. But it’s rare enough that it’s usual to see an explanation of what the brackets are supposed to mean, as Beto did at the bottom of the page.
But he’s stopped doing that in more recent years, relying on people to understand the convention.
June 24, 2015 at 9:27 am |
Todd Klein is a great letterer. Here’s an example of “fancy” lettering used to indicate Arabic:
http://www.kleinletters.com/Fables1.html
June 25, 2015 at 1:16 am |
Nate Piekos’s page on comic book grammar and tradition covers this feature. It’s about halfway down, and includes a note to say:
It’s a clear and helpful page. In 2011 I blogged about it briefly at Sentence first – partly so I could always find it easily.
June 25, 2015 at 1:58 am |
Wonderful. Thanks for the link to this resource.
June 26, 2015 at 11:33 am |
Somewhat on-topic – there used to be a wonderful magazine, Mangajin, for people learning Japanese. Mostly Mangajin parsed the texts of manga cartoons. In manga, when a foreigner is speaking Japanese, his dialog is written in katakana. Lafcadio Hearn, popular in manga, is depicted speaking in katakana.