[i hope this is the right forum- It's writing based and some discussion might help some people? I guess it can just be moved if it comes to that.]

I've never considered using narration boxes for my GN. One reason I think is that a lot of the time, they put me off as a reader. I don't know why exactly that is- I think maybe it's difficult to get it quite "right." I like to write fiction as well as draw, and so writing and story are very, very important to me. I feel that a lot of comic narration sounds the same and is often unnecessary or filler, or written badly. It's easier for sub-par writing to skirt under the radar when masquerading under pretty art and lots of action (not saying it's acceptable- just less easily detected by the reader). But when weak story-telling is printed visibly in words, people are more likely to scoff at a glance and move on right there.

One thing that comes to mind is the narration style in ElfQuest, and the Pinis' apparent insistence to use an exclamation mark at the end of every other sentence. It seemed there was a lot of relying on narration boxes to describe what's going on with pictures in a full-page montage instead of letting the characters convey it to you (at least this seemed to be the case in the earlier graphic novels- I never thoroughly read the more recent ones). I think it's very easy to fall into the habit of Telling instead of Showing. Personally, I think the writer of a comic should be able to tell a story using merely the pictures and the dialog (though, of course, you can easily Tell instead of Show with a wall of speech as well). If there's an important bit of backstory that the reader needs to know, I think it's more memorable if the characters themselves make it known through their actions and speech. It also subsequently develops your characters a bit more and forces you to learn good pacing. My personal stand is- if you want to write, then write a novel, and add some illustrations if you please. I read comics mainly to appreciate art and the stories that can be told through it.

Now all this doesn't mean that I think no one should ever use narration boxes. If done right, they can be very effective and helpful. I think the cases in which I like narration the most is when it's first-person introspection. How about you guys? I know it's a common aspect of graphic novels and I know probably a lot of GN makers on this board use them- so what are your thoughts when it comes to writing them? Why you do or don't use them? Deciding where they should go, how they should be handled? How often do you think they should be used?

I avoid them as much as possible as I much prefer to convey transitions and such visually. It's not always possible of course: sometimes avoiding them would require using, instead, a whole page to set a location, and that would quickly become redundant and obvious. But I limit them to the strict minimum anyway and never to actually narrate.
That said, I don't believe it's a general rule that narrative boxes are best shunned. They jar in immersive stories where it's desirable for the reader to forget they're reading a graphic novel (which is the case of my current work). That doesn't apply for the many, many stories that present themselves as a graphic novel and go on to play with all the tools the medium has to offer (Asterios Polyp, anything by Chris Ware, several European series like Achille Talon). These engage the reader into reflecting ont he medium itself and narrative boxes are more than appropriate there. They can also be used to great advantage when made a part of the presentation of the story – I believe Alan Moore did this a lot.
So really in the end I think they're a mistake only when they're used out of not knowing what else to do to move the story forward.

These boxes have other applications, they're not just used for narration and explaining and setting a mood (things you can easily achieve with visuals and dialogue). They have much better uses: establishing time and place ("Yesterday.", "A few months later.", "The Library", etc.), give the names of characters instead of tedious introductions (a box with "Chris" near Chris and we know this guy's Chris - also, it's easy to get back to it and check his name again because it's not lost in clutter of text), humor (not a comic, but "Arrested Development" is a good example), or anything appropriate, really. If a certain character only "talks" (thinks, really) in captions and never actually speaks, that makes them extremely introverted and makes it pretty easy to understand how introverted that character is - in other words, the narration is there for a reason. If the narration is only there because you didn't plan your comic right or didn't bother to think of a better way to 'show' instead of 'tell', well... that's no good.
You just got to keep in mind why you're doing what you're doing. If you don't have a reason and there's more than one way to achieve the same thing - think it over. That's not true only to narration boxes, it's true to pretty much every aspect of doing anything, not just comics.

Narration boxes are a more modern thing that replaced thought bubbles. Brian Michael Bendis from Marvel is trying to bring back the thought balloon as a device. I like it, its more of a silver age-y kinda approach and lightens the mood.

Just as long as you don't do stuff like "oh no, Doctor Doom is launching ten thousand robotic scorpions at me...how will i survive...OH THE PERIL!!!!!" as your character is falling through a dimensional portal........unless you want old school camp.

hahaha

I never understood that. Narrative boxes have an immensely different impact from thought balloons, I have no idea how they can have decided to replace one with the other. They should just do better writing for thought balloons. Every time I see these narration boxes I feel like the character is, well, narrating, to us, after the facts. Or writing in a diary. It feels so wrong.

Well, would that be okay if the character actually keeps a diary or if the comic is playing with the 4th wall?

Cool topic! I've just finished up the script for my GN and this is something that I remember having trouble deciding on when I started. I would agree that using captions to say something that should/could be done with the art or dialogue isn't the best approach.

For my own story, I've used on first person narration as well as dialogue. I really liked how this ended up colouring the story and gave you some insight into what the main character was thinking. I also liked how I could use one of the comics unique properties and place images and words side-by-side and have them tell a slightly different story. I liked that contrast. So the voice over narration adds to the story and elaborates on characters, etc., while the dialogue and art sort of go together.

The one thing that I have avoided doing was to have captions that say something like "Later..." or "Back in the office..." because this should be obvious with the art, the narration or the dialogue. Mostly the art though.

The only time this might work for a story is when you would need to establish a completely different setting or time. Something like a time travel scene, or a different planet. Something not obvious in the artwork.

Yes of course! But when you're reading Batman or the like, it's just bizarre. And they never seem to bother to really reflect what that character would really sound like in his or her own head. Terrible.

Hahaaaa JohnK made a random post along similar lines last week. It wasn't long or detailed, just simply pointing out how ridiculous narration from a character perspective can be.

Hahaha ridiculous!

Don't forget, many times the use of narravtive is to prod the reader along or spoonfeed them details that they may overlook, no matter how obvious.

I use narrative in El Cuervo, because my character doesn't speak all that often. I use the boxes in a similar manner as in a movie.

Most of the time, the narrative is needed because I'm showing imagery relating to what's happening in the dialogue, and it comes off better than a thought bubble. It has its purpose, so long as it isn't over-used. I hate comics with long streams of text - if I can't figure out what you're trying to tell me with the visual, then your communication needs to improve.

Look at Aviv - he uses no words at all, and conveys emotion and ideas very clearly. It isn't hard - you just have to be more creative with your visual, and more concise with your text.

It has a place-- depending on how you use it, of course.

Our first few pages is Narration/Caps heavy-- but, it's told in a first person dialouge-- which, I think is sort of the "modern" usage of dialouge boxes.

Crime, in particular, works really well in first person caps-- but a lot of that has to do w/ the genre conventions. We're used to hearing Voice Overs in detective/pulp/noir novels and movies...so they work really well in those types of comics.

But, yeah-- in general the whole: "Meanwhile, back at the farm..." type info text has really fallen by the wayside.
I still think there's things that can be done with it-- for example, I read a fellow collaborator's pitch where he used the boxes as a third person narrator who doesn't appear to be enjoying the comic. So, obviously, there's still room to play around with the convention.

Personally, I'm a fan of first person narrative-- but it all depends on the type of story you're telling. Spy6teen is a single protagonist, so it's pretty easy to slide in and out of it-- but, I'm still always wary of doing it-- in fact, if you look at the first few pages, you'll see that I was consciously playing around with voice overs before sliding into caps...That all goes back to that horrific first issue of Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man-- I don't know if anyone read that, but the opening page features a Splash of Spiderman, and a freakin' NOVEL cap box. Seriously, it ran the entire page.
I'll give ya, dude isn't a writer, but still-- that's a very clear case of using Narration badly.

One thought balloons: Yeah, I don't see them coming back...not in a mainstream sense at least. Too bad, because I think there are interesting things that could be done with them.

I'll throw in with the "for good purpose camp", but I'll go so far as to say that if you have a good reason for using narration bubbles, you're probably alright. The only time they suck is when they're used as a cop-out for something else. These cheap-o cheater narration bubbles just highlight the original deficiency and make the page look even worse. I, like Lobrien, have been turned off many times by bad narration bubbles.

As for their appropriate uses, I have no qualms using narration bubbles as in character voice-over if it fits the story. Many great prose classics, (catcher in the rye, to kill a mocking bird, Wheel of Time?) use an completely unexplained narrator. When is this person talking? Who are they talking to? We don't know! And it doesn't really matter, because it makes the story intimate and relatable. I think we should look at voice-overs in that light.

And omniscient narrators who aren't in the story (like LoTR)? That's fine too, as long as it plays to the story and voice you're going for.

And thought bubbles! Oh my gosh, why don't we use these anymore? I see indie artists struggling to develop new techniques for communicating with the visual language of comics (tailless bubbles in Earthsong, or the experiments of Octopus Pie), and I've no idea why we've left thought bubbles by the wayside. Clearly, like narration bubbles, they've been horribly misused and are associated with terrible writing, but that sounds like a bad reason to abandon a tool that all comic readers (and many non-comic readers) immediately understand. It's like refusing to use the word "and" in your comics because you hate run on sentences.

Comics is unique among visual mediums in that has a clearly established iconography and methodology for communicating character's thoughts and impressions. Obviously prose can just tell you what a character is thinking, but that's not true for nearly all mediums. Movies can hack a voice-over, but those end up unclear (why do I hear a voice but the character's mouth isn't moving?). Theater and sculpture can't even muster a hack (unless they imitate comics with a thought-balloon prop). Why don't we exploit this feature of our craft more? Why don't writers pour intimate stream-of-consciousness dialog into their characters?

Even prose doesn't have the potential to juxtopose a person's action in the world (via the art) with their intimate thoughts about those events as they happen. I feel like we could use this to write much more amazing stories than I've ever seen done with comics. (But usually people just tell me the thought balloons are unnecessary to moving the plot forward. )

I was listening to a podcast with writer James Robinson talking about this. He was saying how narration boxes were introduced on a groundbreaking comic (either Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen i think) and other creators started to play "follow the leader" . They wanted to make comics more adult, and get them away from the campy silver and bronze age stuff and thought balloons were part of that...so narration boxes helped to make things more cinematic and serious.

Now there is a bit of a push to go back to bubbles from what i hear. I think its interesting, but really it was a case of fashion and style of the tiems.

This is a much better explanation than what I posted earlier of what I'm trying to do. I love the idea that you can show one thing and say something completely differently in comics. There aren't a lot of other mediums that let you play with two messages like that.

I have to admit that I'm not that into thought balloons. It's mainly because it's another layer of complexity to the art that I can't seem to make look good. But I guess I'm thinking about Garfield type thought bubbles. Maybe that's my problem. haha

I love good narration though. I'm not sure if I've used it very well in my story but I enjoy what it has added so far. I know for a fact that one time I just threw in some narration to move the story forward and got a throng of comments about it. Now I am adding an entire spread so that I can remove my lame cop out.


You should have said it like this, "I think they're a mistake only when they're used out of not knowing what else to do to move the story forward like Jason did on page 74."
http://www.remindblog.com/2010/07/26/pages-74-75/

Anyway, For me, there's something really appealing about reading a novel and being able to read all the thoughts that a character is thinking. For instance, Harry Potter. The books were so deep because you were just forced to think and feel every feeling that Harry went through. Where as the movies are just great looking visuals to accompany the books really. You get absolutely no depth out of the movies at the level that the books allowed.

With graphic novels, we have the ability to show off the visuals as well as dig deeper with the written. To me it's the best of both worlds.

Another good example of narration I've seen recently is the tv show "Dexter". I mean, this guy is completely fake on the outside from what he appears to be. There would be no way to connect with him if you weren't allowed to hear his thoughts and justification of every little thing going through his mind. His thoughts are so strong that they even take on the form of his father when he's trying to figure out what to do next. Anyway, great thread!!!

I use thought bubbles a lot, precisely for this – characters' thoughts. How else can we get a "live" look into someone doing some thinking? I'mnot going to make her talk aloud to herself, LOL. But I avoid narrating through them, these are truly for inner thoughts, and also I pretty much ONLY use them for my lead character, since we are living the story through her. Other characters' thoughts are not accessible to the reader, they only see what she sees. If I used narrative boxes instead as the new trend dictates, the feeling of immediacy would vanish, because they really sound like they're narrated or written down after the facts.

@jason--i think you hit the nail on the head. For our generation, we associate thought bubbles with comic strips and lighter material like Garfield, all ages super hero stuff (Tiny Titans, Batman:Brave and the Bold etc). Its something that is more of how we understand comics as a collective than any sort of style or art thing.

I really like them because they are uncommon as well as kinda interesting. I'm messing with them right now...we'll see.

Oh, great topic. IM&L uses narration boxes, though of course that was the writer's call and not mine. They're all first-person, though, basically acting as thought balloons in some cases--- but what they allow for is for the reader to know it's her thoughts even when she's not in the picture. I think it'd be kind of awkward to show a series of landscapes or action elsewhere and have some random thought balloons that the reader is supposed to connect back to character A.

Bryan Lee O'Malley uses narration boxes/captions in Scott Pilgrim really well, for comedic effect. It's a quick way to know who the characters are and random little trivia about their lives. But I'd say one of the most successful aspects is how well they're integrated into the design of the page as a whole.

I LOVE Bryan Lee O'Malley's use of narration/captions. I'm so glad they were able to incorporate them into the movie. C: I do like narration boxes when used creatively or in non-conventional ways. But I guess things also depend on the tone of the story you're telling too- like with Scott Pilgrim, a lot of it is rather tongue-in-cheek and so the kind of narration O'Malley uses works really well. And aside from an aspect of comedy, he uses it in necessary ways (to make quick introcutions, remind the audience of things, etc, like you said) but not to the point where we're getting a lot of unneeded information (blood type, astrology sign, favorite food, blah blah blah).

Now that I've thought of it, I'm going to bring up narration techniques in manga. I haven't read a lot, lot of manga, but I've noticed that they use narration in ways you don't see a whole lot in western comics. For instance, switching points of view in narration. I suppose the same effect could be accomplished with thought bubbles but in this case the entire duty of first-person narration is given to another character, usually the central minor character of a chapter and usually it's limited to that one chapter (and then the reigns are handed back to the main character or another in the next chapter.) Maybe it's my relative inexperience with the Japanese comic techniques but it can get confusing sometimes! I suppose every artist is different in how they present their comic but sometimes I can't tell what is a thought "bubble" and what is narration. Maybe this is more common with the shoujo manga but I usually don't find narration boxes that set these modes of thought apart. My main source here is Fruits Basket, if anyone is wondering.

On a related note, there's an instance in one of the earlier volumes when something happens- one character is kneeling on the ground and another is leaning over him/her or something like that; the character on the ground stands up and the top of his/her head knocks into the chin of the standing character. But none of this is visibly shown to the reader! Instead, another character interrupts the scene, randomly breaks the fourth wall and tells the reader that she saw what happened and this is how it went- and then the scene resumes with the aftermath of the occurrence and the characters talking about it. I don't understand why the author decided to do it this way! Was she afraid she wouldn't be able to draw it happening? As far as I can tell there was no other reason for this. They even used the same technique in the anime! WHAT! If anyone knows what I'm talking about please chime in- maybe I'm not getting something here? Was she really just that lazy? I suppose later I could look for the scan of the page or the clip from the anime if anyone wants to see it...
Also the "explaining elements in the art with small words and arrows pointing " I notice sometimes. Is it also lazy, or just cartoony, like in Scott Pilgrim? (I guess that would depend on how it's used as well.)

I'm sorry if this turned into some kind of manga-based rant fest, I don't mean for it to appear that I have something against the medium, I don't. Just a few things to ponder, I suppose.