Text Balloons

[Fiji]

How about an ATL that doesn't involve millions of people getting killed.

What would it take to make text balloons in comic books an unknown in 2005.
So, either no one ever thought about text being displayed like that or there once were two schools and the non-text balloon school won (and only comic book collectors know about text balloons).

Option one seems rather impossible ... sooner or later, someone's gonna put the text in the drawing itself iso below it.

For option two I could imagine something like the Prince Valiant comic becoming insanely popular. Which seem rather hard to do, since historically, it's 2 main weaknesses were that they were too expencive and there was to much time between two issues. (especially compared to stuff like Peanuts or Popeye).

Maybe the dime novels of late 19th century USA (was that their name?) are a way to go? I remember them having quite extencive cover art.
anyone got any ideas?

 

[reformer]

Well, I personally sometimes prefer comics with the text at the bottom. That's also how they translate the comics into other languages. Perhaps in a foregn occupied US, English would be put into comics at the bottom as a translation, while the texts are in, say, German, or Japenese, or Zulu or whatever. When the US is freed 30 years later, people are used to bottom text, and the talking buble is eliminated. (yay! killed off people anyway!)

 

[Thande]

Doesn't the speech bubble arguably go back to the medieval illustration tradition of having a sort of scroll come out of the mouth of the figure with the text written on it?

 

[Fiji]

Doesn't the speech bubble arguably go back to the medieval illustration tradition of having a sort of scroll come out of the mouth of the figure with the text written on it?

I vaguely remember something like that,
but the scroll was not in general use

 

[Tyr]

Well newspaper comics with political satire and the like typically had the text on the bottom. Maybe have some of these tone down to become more mainstream?
I'm certain a lot of early British stuff had text at the bottom actually.
Its mainly just for kids you get the bubbles involved.

 

[Thande]

This is the sort of thing I was talking about: