page_title: Speech balloon
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Speech balloon / History
caption_attribution_description: Saint Anne and Angel (detail) - Bernhard Strigel (1506/1507)
context_page_description: Speech balloons are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic books, comics, and cartoons to allow words to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character in the comic. Often, a formal distinction is made between the balloon that indicates thoughts and the one that indicates words spoken aloud; the balloon that conveys thoughts is often referred to as a thought bubble or conversation cloud.
context_section_description: One of the earliest antecedents to the modern speech bubble were the "speech scrolls", wispy lines that connected first-person speech to the mouths of the speakers in Mesoamerican art between 600 and 900 AD.
  Earlier, paintings, depicting stories in subsequent frames, using descriptive text resembling bubbles-text, were used in murals, one such example witten in Greek, dating to the 2nd century, found in Capitolias, today in Jordan.
  In Western graphic art, labels that reveal what a pictured figure is saying have appeared since at least the 13th century. These were in common European use by the early 16th century. Word balloons (also known as "banderoles") began appearing in 18th-century printed broadsides, and political cartoons from the American Revolution (including some published by Benjamin Franklin) often used them – as did cartoonist James Gillray on the other side of the Atlantic. They later fell out of fashion, but by 1904 had regained their popularity, although they were still considered novel enough to require explanation. With the development of the comics industry in the 20th century, the appearance of speech balloons has become increasingly standardized, though the formal conventions that have evolved in different cultures (USA as opposed to Japan, for example), can be quite distinct.
  Richard F. Outcault's Yellow Kid is generally credited as the first American comic strip character. His words initially appeared on his yellow shirt, but word balloons very much like those in use today were added almost immediately, as early as 1896. By the start of the 20th century, word balloons were ubiquitous; since that time, few American comic strips and comic books have relied on captions, notably Hal Foster's Prince Valiant and the early Tarzan comic strip in the 1930s. In Europe, where text comics were more common, speech balloons slowly caught on, with well-known examples being Alain Saint-Ogan's Zig et Puce (1925), Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin (1929), and Rob-Vel's Spirou (1938).
caption: Before the 20th century, speech was depicted using bands, flags, scrolls, or sheets of paper.[1]
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