Panel 1: This is the rare occasion in which I find the elongated word-balloon tail acceptable—that is, using it to clearly indicate which of the two characters is speaking. (OTOH, I could’ve just moved the word balloons downward, requiring a shorter balloon tail.) Alas, waaaay too many comics letterers nowadays are absolutely obsessed with using absurdly long tails that are rarely necessary as, say, only one character is shown in the g-d panel. Almost as obnoxious, they’re even more obsessed with pointing said balloon tails at or even inside the speaker’s mouth, so you’ll often see ridiculously lengthy tails stretching across comic panels and obnoxiously jabbing at characters’ gaping maws.

As usual, manga shows the way, as most mangaka use very short, almost vestigial word-balloon tails for their dialogue, as we just need to see some clarification of who’s speaking in a given panel, as opposed to the ungainly American lettering approach of “this guy’s mouth is a-flappin’, see? See?” Hell, some manga artists get truly hardcore and don’t use balloon tails at all, leaning on rock-solid storytelling and distinctive dialogue patterns to make clear which character the dialogue belongs to.

Panel 2: Every now and then my love of slight camera tilts—usually clockwise, for some reason—bites me in the butt, and this is a fine example of the problematic usage. Emp looks like she’s leaning rightward when the panel is supposed to be tilted a fair bit; however, the lack of a concrete background makes this completely unclear. Oh, well. (Sometime I’ll have to explain why I so enjoy using so-called “Dutch angles.)

Today’s Patreon Update: As this is a Monday, time for our weekly double dose of life drawings new-ish (2018) and old (2017), along with the high-res Photoshop raw scans for both of ‘em, available to all Patreon tiers.

-Adam Warren