This is kind of a broad topic with many interlocking parts (and answers) but I’m wondering about the first uses of the various symbolic representations of concepts that are used in comics and animation that are taken for granted today but had to begin somewhere.
I’m thinking of things like:
Bubbles with a solid “arrow” leading back to the character to represent speech, and bubbles with a line of small bubbles to represent unvocalized thoughts.
A raindrop-shaped drawing on the forehead or cheek to represent suprise.
A hash mark to represent an injury.
Lines drawn to represent motion.
Drawing the character flipped upside down (usually with curved motion lines) to represent extreme surprise.
Eyes literally popping out of the head to represent attraction.
Birds/stars/something circling the head to represent a head injury.
And many other things that don’t come to mind at the moment. I’m sure that some come from physical comedy like Vaudville (like the hat flying off someone’s head when they are suprised) and possibly from silent films, maybe some of them from earlier conventional art (did anything else use motion lines?) some probably started in animation and moved to comics, and some probably the other way around. I’m interested in any discussion related to any of the various origins.
Long ago I saw a reference to noted cartoonist Peter Arno as creating the convention of Xs over the eyes of a character to denote drunkenness. I don’t recall any confirmation of that though.
There are things that can arguably be called speech balloons going back to the 2nd Century and they were extensively used by editorial cartoonists in the 18th Century. For whatever reason they fell out of favor for almost 100 years until being resurrected in the early development of the newspaper comic strip. This comeback can kind of be seen in The Yellow Kid. At first, his speech was written on his shirt. But when Richard Outcault wanted other characters to start talking, he used the balloons that had gone out of fashion. His strip was so popular, other cartoonist started using the balloons until it was the typical way of expressing cartoon speech.
I did not understand all your examples, but for the ones I did, my question to you would be: Do you have any better way to do that? Because comic reading is fast, and intuitive. It works. People have been drawing this way because it is effective. Comic autors have been copying from one another, and they “stole” the things that worked best, which has been creating a style. I like it. I (try to) do it too. What do you not understand? How would you do it differently, i.e., better?
Roman graffiti was full of speech balloons, almost always scurrilous. Just like today, they might say things like “Julia puts out” and “I have an enormous dick!”
I think the “raindrops” mentioned above actually represent drops of sweat. They’re usually shown surrounding the person’s head and represent the anxiety evoked by a surprise or the effort spent in thinking. They’re often represented by simple dashes radiating from the head.
If so, that is neither a raindrop nor does it indicate surprise. It’s a sweat drop and it indicates embarrassment, confusion, exasperation, or anxiety.
One I wonder about is the light bulb coming on above the head to represent someone having a bright idea. This obviously must have originated after Edison invented the thing, but what was used before then?
Asterix has a funny take on this. When a character in the strip has a bright idea, an ancient oil lamp appears above his head!
Speed marks are used for just that, to represent motion. Otherwise the drawings would be static and much less interesting.
An interesting exception to this is Prince Valiant. Hal Foster rarely used speed marks, since his drawings were so realistic they could often be taken as still illustrations. Only when an action was exceptionally swift and/or violent (like chopping off an opponent’s hand) would you see them.
They are called “plewds”. Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker identified most of the convetions in this thread and gave them names in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana (Used on Amazon for a mere $200.) Alas, he didn’t get into origins but he did catalog them and give them interesting names.
FWIW, the “hashtags” are called “lucaflect” when they are used to indicate that something is round and shiny. And the stars circling the head are called “squean”.
This happened a lot to Charlie Brown when he played baseball. Charles Schulz was a master at this sort of thing: “If you want to draw rain/wood/whatever, you have to think rain/wood/whatever.”
You mean like this? My eyes would pop out too!
You’ve never been hit in the head hard enough to see stars? I have, and all the colors of the rainbow, too!
Not the same thing. In the Charlie Brown case it exaggerates physical violence. I mean used symbolicly to represent someone “knocked off their feet” in surprise. It is parodied in this manga page, but it happens in American comics, too, usually after the punch-line in a newspaper comic.
I don’t accept that. It seems intuitive because you are familiar with it. Unless (as I asked about) you have examples of—for instance—motion lines in 30,000-year-old cave paintings?
The eyes popping out of the head, including terentii’s example above, was a Tex Avery thing, although I don’t know if he originated it. Click on this link for another example of even more Tex Avery eye-popping (sorry, the link won’t generate an in-post image here).
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