Aug
27
2010
Most comic books and graphic novels letter the body text (dialogue and narration) in all-caps. Here are some of the best all-caps free fonts. If you’d like to download any of the fonts, please see the links below.
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Aug
08
2010
Blambot has an awesome article about formatting comic book balloons. It’s aimed at comic book letterers, but I think there are some key points also useful for comic book writers doing a script. For example, do you know how to handle translated dialogue or when to use quotation marks?
- Only use quotation marks when somebody is speaking off-panel. If the speaker is on-panel, readers don’t need quotation marks to know it’s dialogue.
- If you ever end a shouted question with a question mark and an exclamation point, put the question mark first. Readers will have many context clues that the line is being shouted, such as body language and the bolded/italicized text, but the question mark is pretty much the only indication that a question is involved.
- Each period should be followed by one space, not two. Double spaces take too much space and look awkward. (If you habitually use double-spaces, it may help to use your text processor’s Find/Replace feature to replace all periods followed by two spaces with periods followed by single spaces).
- How to handle text translated from a language besides English. See below. Note: Generally, the “*Translated from [Language]” caption is necessary just once per scene. After that, readers can figure out what language the characters are speaking when you use the <greater than/less than signs>.
http://www.blambot.com/grammar.shtml
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