Types of Speech Bubbles, Shown on Real Comic Pages

Every speech bubble tells you two things before you read a word inside it. The outline says how the line is said: spoken, shouted, whispered or only thought. The position says when, because readers take bubbles in a fixed order, top to bottom.

So you don't need to memorize a catalog of shapes. A handful of outlines and four placement rules cover almost every page. All but one of the examples below are cut from real comic pages.

Speech bubble types and what each outline means

Start from the plain oval with a tail. Every other type changes its edge or its tail. The edge sets the volume: smooth for talking, spikes for shouting, dashes for a whisper, a cloud or a trail of circles for a thought.

The tail sets the source. It points at a mouth, runs off the panel for someone out of frame, or disappears when the voice belongs to the narrator.

Boxes work differently. A caption or narration box has no tail because nobody in the panel is speaking, which makes it the place for time, place and the storyteller's own voice. Manhwa adds the system window, a game-style screen that talks to the hero in isekai and regression stories.

Letterer Nate Piekos covers the same conventions, from tail angles to whispers, in his guide to comic book grammar, along with rarer ones like coughs and sung lines.

Four placement rules that set the reading order

Readers follow whatever order the layout gives them, so a bubble in the wrong spot can make a character answer a question nobody has asked yet.

1. Read top to bottom, then left to right. The higher bubble goes first, and in a webtoon's single column, height is the only order there is. Manga in its original format runs right to left, as our manga, manhwa and manhua guide explains.
2. Put the first speaker higher. When two characters talk in one panel, stage the one who speaks first on the left, so their bubble can sit above and to the left of the reply.
3. Aim every tail at its speaker without crossing anything. A tail that crosses another tail or bubble makes readers guess who said what, and tails aimed at the wrong face are one of the slips readers look for when spotting an AI webtoon.
4. Keep faces and action clear. Bubbles go in dead space like sky, walls and panel edges, never over eyes, hands or the thing that just happened. This short video on bubble placement walks through the same don'ts.

To test a page, number its bubbles in the order you meant, then hand it to someone else without the numbers. If they read it differently, move a bubble rather than adding an arrow.

Bubbles on a phone: one speaker, short lines, room between

Most webtoon readers scroll on a phone, so a page that looks fine on a monitor ends up the width of a hand. The wider rules for phone reading, like a single column and faces that hold up when small, are in our guide to webtoon generators. Bubbles need their own care on a small screen:

• Check text size at phone width. Zoom the page out until it's as wide as a phone, and if a bubble needs a pinch to read, its text is too small or its line too long.
• Give each bubble one speaker. Two voices sharing one outline are hard to tell apart at that size.
• Leave space between bubbles. In a vertical scroll a gap reads as a pause, and two bubbles jammed together read as one breath.

Short lines make all of this easier. When a line won't fit comfortably, split it into two bubbles from the same speaker, like the pair in the grid above.

If you make a comic on FicPal, new comics are lettered as an editable layer, so you can retype a line, change a balloon's type or size, or have FicPal re-place the balloons, all for free. This advice works as a request too: ask for short lines and one speaker at a time in the notes. Your first comic is covered by the free credits you get at signup, and each chapter after it currently costs 50 purchased credits.

Comic sound effects, grouped by what they convey

Sound effects are lettering too, but they belong to the art. They sit in the panel without a bubble, and the letters themselves do the job an outline does for speech.

Decide what the sound conveys before you hunt for a word, then pick one that sounds like it. Short words with hard consonants hit, like CRASH and KRAK, while stretched letters and trailing dots drag a sound out, like HAAH... HAAH...

Match the letterforms to the sound as well. These comics use dripping red brush letters for violence and clean neon for machines, and one even letters a silence, following a THUD with the word SILENCE in glowing type.

Before you letter a page

• Read each line aloud and give it the outline that matches how it sounds.
• Number the bubbles in reading order and move any that land out of sequence.
• Check every bubble at phone width, one speaker each, with room between them.
• Letter sound effects into the art, in letters that match what they convey.

Bubbles start in the script, one line per bubble in the order they'll be read. Our webtoon script format guide shows how a page script lays that out before anything is drawn.