Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Making the Facebook rounds recently, this 3/30/10 Bizarro cartoon on speech (or word) balloons (or bubbles):

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

A meta cartoon, in several senses.

First, it treats one of the conventions of cartooning, the speech balloon, as a concrete object. Moreover, one that can be referred to in the cartoon itself. And, finally, self-referentially, inside itself. (It’s like saying, in falsetto, “Say it in falsetto, like this”.)

Dan Piraro returns to balloon conventions every so often, combining such meta-talk with reflections on the difference between speech balloons and thought balloons.

From my 6/3/12 posting “Balloons”, this 6/3/12 Bizarro on speech balloons and thought balloons:

(#2) (with 3 Bizarro symbols in it)

And then in a 11/7/12 strip, with a balloon-reflective cichlid:

(#3) The joke here is that underwater, speech would come out in bubbles, so that the visual difference between speech balloon and thought balloon is neutralized

This entry was posted on March 30, 2019 at 6:25 am and is filed under Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.