Note the rare use of a thought balloon in panel 1. (Was going to fulminate at length about the use of the term “thought balloon” as opposed to the tragically misinformed if not downright heretical “thought bubble,” but that’s a rant for another day.)

Panel 4: Note that I like to use a “four-dot” ellipsis, as opposed to the more conventional “three-period” ellipsis used by most comics folk. Then again, I borrowed this technique for a “silent word balloon” from manga, where wildly varying numbers of periods are used for this sort of thing. Some mangaka use dozens of periods—arranged in multiple rows—when they employ this technique.

-Adam Warren