Camden, V - The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes in Contemporary Comics

The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes in Contemporary
Comics
Vera J. Camden
American Imago, Volume 77, Number 3, Fall 2020, pp. 603-638 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2020.0031
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/765865
[ Access provided at 23 Oct 2020 21:38 GMT from Fondren Library, Rice University ]
VERA J. CAMDEN
The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
in Contemporary Comics
In a 2017 New York Times article, Jonah Bromwich asks the
question: “Why are all of our words in bubbles?” Pointing to
the decision by Apple, Facebook, and Twitter to put all messages in the comics form of bubbles, he notes how the rounded
edges convey a softer, more receptive graphic format in which
to receive information. So, Bromwich consults comics expert
Scott McCloud, who explains the psychology of such a graphic
design decision: “bubbles created a consistent amount of negative space around words, which was desirable from a graphic
standpoint.” Bromwich then suggests, “The rounded edges of
text bubbles also gave messages a soft, friendly connotation.
That’s an element especially useful in texted communication,
where tone and body language are absent” (2017). Such negative space in the text bubble cushions the ambiguity or other
anxious effects of uncontained text, softening the sharp edges
of letters by friendly, rounded shapes.
The rounded shapes of a Facebook Messenger or iMessage text derive from the comics page; the rounded shapes of
thought bubbles and speech balloons draw forth “tone and body
language.” Yet the thought bubble and the speech balloon are
quite distinct devices and serve very different functions in the
comics medium. My discussion of the vicissitudes of thought
bubbles pivots on the uniqueness of this comics convention.
As I take up the particularly embattled fate of the thought
bubble in contemporary comics, my claim will be that the
current, demonstrable trend in mainstream comics publishing to banish this friendly and familiar vehicle of expression
in comics not only limits the expressive range of comics as a
medium, but also, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, reveals
a reaction against and a purging of affect and thought itself
from the comics page. I will conclude by gathering up a few
American Imago, Vol. 77, No. 3, 603–638. © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press
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The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
Figure 1. Sina Grace, Nothing Lasts Forever, 2017, p. 77.
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hopeful and creative examples of contemporary comics that
deliberately resist the trends of corporate comics publishers.
While keeping up with current comics style, these comics artists
deliberately retain the centrality of the thought bubble and the
complex internal life to which it points.
The parallel grammar of comics and text messages juxtaposed on the page from Sina Grace’s graphic memoir, Nothing
Lasts Forever, shows the thought bubble and the speech balloon
in spontaneous reciprocity (Figure 1). But this dynamic also
highlights that the two devices are different: they come from
different places in the comics’ character and they work differently in the narrative progression. The thought bubble precedes
the text message. It is literally in a bubble and private—we can
see rotating bubbles when someone is typing a response to our
message, suggesting the other person is now thinking. The text
message encapsulated in a shape akin to the speech balloon
records thought—as in diary keeping—but it is not thought.
The text message has the status of speech in this comic. It aims
to replicate speech with its back and forth pattern. Thought,
on the other hand, leads to more thought, associatively, and
unless it is put into words and speech, privately.
The play between the thought bubbles and the speech balloons in this panel capture how the character’s internal anxiety,
desire for support, and hope for a response gets conveyed in
speech in the immediacy of the move from internal to external.
As suggested by this comics panel, Grace debates whether or not
to text his ex-boyfriend, Cash. Through the dialogue of texts,
he realizes that he needs Cash. The thought bubbles provide
access to the internal pain of the character and his neurotic
thoughts, while his texts translate almost instantaneously into
text message “speech balloons” that reach out to his friend.
Both devices reveal human motivation, both depict human
desire, and both, as Grace says, “advance the narrative, in any
event” (2017, p. 77). But this contemporary example clearly
illustrates the contrast between the two different domains of
process and product. Thought bubbles have traditionally functioned in comics to offer insight into the life of a character
even as creators advance the narrative through speech and
action. Grace’s bubbles, though, may well remind readers of
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a time when the use of the thought bubble was pervasive in
mainstream comics when neurotic heroes like Spider-Man spent
much of their time conflicted over life as a hero and a citizen
(Figure 2). For example, Spider-Man simultaneously speaks with
Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, and wonders to himself
how to resolve the conflict that his greatest villain is also his
best friend’s father.1 Though Spider-Man may be famous for
his internal conflicts, they were not particular to him, indeed,
one need only open any issue of most mainstream comics from
before 2000 and will be flooded by images of characters deep
in thought, surrounded by as many bubbles as soda pop, and
poised for action or an encounter with a new plot element.2
For example, in the image of Storm with her hands elevated,
the bubble directs the reader down the page into Storm’s feelings as she comes to terms with the loss of her mutant powers
and learns to live with herself in this new life (Figure 3). The
striking illustration of Barry Windsor-Smith accompanied by the
internal processes written in the bubbles by Chris Claremont
give us insight into the character and slows down our process
as readers as we think about this character and engage with
her internal thought. To offer another instance, the thought
bubble emanating from Supergirl shows her concluding desperately that if she cannot solve this mystery, she will not succeed
(Figure 4). The bubble once again connects us to internal
feeling. Such uses of the thought bubble may now feel out of
date, but they gave the reader a sense of suspense, anxiety, even
personal security as they offered insight into the character’s
private desire, dreams, and dread.3
In an example that brings together the threads of this
discussion, the Psychoanalysis comics series of the 1950s, which
were printed for a short time in the heyday of both comics
and psychoanalysis, utilized the thought bubble to advance
their narratives of “remembering, repeating, and working
through” (Freud, 1958 [1914]). With the popularization of the
psychoanalytic treatment in comic books,4 the direct connection to psychoanalytic practice seems obvious because thought,
associations and feelings are brought into the room; the plot
is dependent upon putting thoughts into words. In these comics, action is “inter-action,” contained in the fantasies and the
memories that come to be narrated in the consulting room.
Vera J. Camden
Figure 2. Stan Lee and John Romita, Amazing Spider-Man #40, 1966, p. 17.
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Figure 3. Chris Claremont and Barry Windsor Smith,
Uncanny X-men #198, 1985, p. 23.
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Figure 4. Cary Bates, Artie Saaf, and Vince Colletta, Supergirl #3, 1973, p. 1.
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Figure 5. Daniel Keyes and Jack Kamen, Psychoanalysis #1, 1955, p. 5.
The analyst’s thoughts are stirred up by the boy and his family. He must internally process the feelings brought into the
room and then will proceed to offer an interpretation from
this internalization of feeling, stimulating thought, then turned
into speech (Figure 5).
The place of thought so interestingly finessed in Grace’s
contemporary graphic memoir, and so centrally placed in
the classic comics described above, now presents us with a
comics-situation: for I have noticed that the thought bubble is
currently being burst, is under erasure, and out of fashion in
contemporary mainstream comics. The thought bubble is being
purged from comics production at the behest of mainstream
editors who push comics creators to move from thinking to
showing. Many creators welcome this trend as signifying increasing sophistication in the comics medium, while others mourn
and even resist the demise of its familiar, friendly streams of
bubbles. And despite the fact that attitudes toward this change
in comics style of representation vary from creator to creator, a
mere glance at comics of the last few decades demonstrates that
contemporary trends have privileged a disembodied narrative
voice which describes and determines all internal motivation
in boxes above or amidst the comics panel, more prominent
now that the thought bubble has all but disappeared. If Scott
McCloud points to the bubble not just as a tool but something
that “softens” and in that sense eases our anxiety, the narrative
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box does something different. It is not soft, but rather sharp in
its utilitarian presence. Justin Green in conversation with other
comics creators reflected on such a contrast in representation
of thought in his own work, saying,
I don’t know if you noticed, but old Superman comics
have little panels at the top that say later, or soon, next
day. Well, I turned that into the narrative voice [box]
where I would stack several lines of copy. But then I realized, I’m hiding up there. That’s my voice, but I can show
something below that either contradicts it or amplifies
it. And on top of that, not only do I get to put balloons
into character’s mouths, but there are thought balloons.
(Nelson, 2014, p. 86)5
Such uses of the thought bubble—exemplary in Green’s pioneering, vastly influential and deeply psychological work, Binky
Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary—is lost in the trends of the
new comics’ page. This most recognizable, signature element
of the comics page that uniquely offers unmediated access to
human interiority has become threatened with abandonment.
Thus, while the speech balloon has retained preeminence,
revealing character, showing motivation and propelling action,
the thought bubble’s diminished place signals, I will suggest,
a larger turn away from thought itself.
In his recent lament upon our troubled times, Meaning
and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment, Christopher Bollas describes Western culture of the past five decades or so as
suffering from a “thought phobia.” Indeed, he has noticed a
trend among patients who are “generally uninterested in the
examination of the inner world.” To diagnose this trend, Bollas
uses E.M. Forster’s Henry Wilcox from Howard’s End as an early
exemplar of the unreflective defense against self-knowledge.
Bollas clarifies that Forster’s famous entreaty to “only connect” is not referring to human relationship but rather, and
importantly, to human thought and language. As such, his
clarification provides an inviting analysis of the formal shifts
discussed here in comics and becomes a departure point for
this article. Bollas makes plain that it is the linking of thought
to feeling and to language in all of its forms that provides the
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foundation for human meaning in a culture that advances
profit and material productivity over meaning making. When
blindness trumps insight as the most efficient way to maintain
cool and composure in a bewildering world, Forster implores
us through the character of Mrs. Wilcox to “[l]ive in fragments
no longer.” Bollas interprets this phrase precisely:
[Forster] alludes to a psychological catastrophe in selves
who no longer feel internally integrated. Their inner
life—as opposed to what they may say to others—is
fragmented because a psychic division has occurred
between feeling and speech. It is a rift felt most acutely
in our inner narratives as we speak lived experience to
our self. (2018, p. 24)
Speaking lived experience to our selves—inner narratives—
captures the matter that is contained in thought bubbles. The
world of comics becomes, then, one place where this larger
cultural shift away from inner life might be mapped.
Bollas has long been interested in the problem of control
in and of thought, but his recent work has taken up a symptomatic resistance to free association as a pervasive presentation of
contemporary patients whose “new forms of thinking” signal a
disturbing diminishment of inner and outer relatedness. And
so, as he notes, “We are in urgent need of ways to understand
and reorganize societies so that culture—frames of mind—can
be steered toward more generative paths” (2018, p. xiii).6 The
remnants of resistance among some comics artists whom I will
discuss at the conclusion of this essay augur perhaps a return of
the suppressed bubble, and of an appreciation of the interior
life to which it refers—despite the push of corporate cultures
and the fashion trends of the marketplace. This, in any case,
is my hope.
What’s in a Thought Bubble?
The thought bubble by any other name might be the
speech balloon: these two terms are familiar to comics creators,
readers, critics, and even art historians, and are employed
regularly and often interchangeably in criticism, partly because
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613
of the interest of the drawn line itself. Comics lines offer affective guidance that correlate with written text, underscoring
meaning to be sure but also providing a virtual orchestration
of feeling and attitude. “In truth don’t all lines carry within
them an expressive potential?” asks McCloud (1993, p. 124). Yet
in discussions of comics, the floating between the two names
of two distinct comics devices—the thought bubble and the
speech balloon—is such that the two rounded shapes are often
referred to interchangeably. Sometimes the terms are switched
so that we hear of the thought balloon or speech bubble—and this
confuses things utterly. But the two devices are very different.
The thought bubble, by definition internal and silent, has conventionally been depicted almost exclusively with bubble dots
leading from a character’s head up to a bubble filled with text or
symbols. It is silent: it conveys thought. The stream of gradually
ascending bubbles emanating from a character’s head or body
toward the bigger bubble characterizes this device. The speech
balloon, by contrast, generally is indicated by pointed peak or
an arrow of some sort directed toward yet emanating from the
character’s head, indicating speech.7 The balloon shape filled
with text or symbols is spoken by a character, heard by the
figures to whom it is spoken, and understood by the reader to
be externally available, however muffled or compromised the
sound might be.8
Yet the ambiguity, if not confusion around these shapes and
what one calls them is itself revealing and will lead to further
discussion of the thought bubble and the attack on thought
in our contemporary moment. To illustrate this let us look at
the study of comics by art historian David Carrier who astutely
opines that, “The speech balloon is a great philosophical discovery, a method of representing thought and words” (2000,
p. 4). We see here that Carrier, while wisely and appreciatively
recognizing the importance of both devices, ends up collapsing
them into one. He identifies the rounded shape as the defining elements of comics, but he does not differentiate between
speech and thought in his analysis of speech balloons. His very
book cover—which shows himself as a child with a thought
bubble encircling the book’s title “The Aesthetics of Comics”—
is somewhat misleading for he does not discuss the thought
bubble (Figure 6). The book’s title page, by contrast, contains
the same text, but this time in a speech balloon (Figure 7).
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The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
Figure 6. David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics, 2000, cover.
Vera J. Camden
Figure 7. David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics, 2000, title page.
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It may well be, as Carrier says, that the genius of comics is that
it can show thoughts and words explicitly and dramatically. Yet
blurring of its devices somewhat undermines his analysis of the
comics he so admires, since he aspires to plumb the depths
and originality of what comics can accomplish philosophically.9
The ironic—and iconic—rendering by Roy Lichtenstein
of “kitsch” characters captured the essence of comics for many
cognoscenti of the art world. His artistic parody of the supposedly
trite and sentimental inner life of the romance comic heroine
certainly did not enact an appreciation of comics capacity to
render human depth and may well have ended up demeaning
the narrative device of the thought bubble for comics producers who wanted to achieve more sophistication. His riveting,
larger than life renderings may be in part blamed for the trend
away from the iconic bubbles that loom large in his massive
blown up images. As the “comic” romance heroine reveals
her thoughts, the bubbles that float from small to large above
her head become a signature of cliché—even vacuity. Yet the
vacuity that Lichtenstein creates by taking the bubble (and
sometimes balloon) out of context on his broad and brilliant
canvases should not, I aver, blind us to the power of the thought
bubble or indeed to our own investment in thought—and feeling. Lichtenstein paraded and yet parodied a powerful tool by
disconnecting the bubble from the body in thought, presenting his women as sentimentalists, detached from their context
within meaningful narrative. But the bubble’s attachment to the
body, through a stream or sequence of smaller bubbles, offers
evidence of an interior life for that character, as yet unformulated
in speech. The bubble represents a sheath or filter from the
outside world of the comics’ page for the character. Crucially
for the reader, the bubble offers a window into the character’s
associative flow. In depictions of violence and trauma in comics,
for example, there is a way in which the thought bubble may
indeed ask the reader to pause and think about such actions,
asking the reader to process the images they are witnessing.
“We can not only see the character acting in the world, which
in prose we cannot, we can also see into that person’s thoughts,
which in theatre, movies, and television we cannot,” says Brad
Reed (2015). The thought bubble slows down time, focusing
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617
often on a human body, and asking us to take in that connection corporeally. Without the thought bubble, as Joe McCulloch
has said, comics becomes more cool—and aloof (2010). Such
a stance diminishes the philosophical capacity of comics: its
access to the inner life of its characters.
The Travails of the Thought Bubble
The fate of the thought bubble has inspired a kind of
ancients-versus-moderns debate on several comics blogs and
critical commentaries(see Conway, 2020). With lamentation
for what is lost on one side, and celebration for new trends
and devices on the other, one sees a shift away from showing
spontaneous, internal, complex thought of the character’s
subjective state as captured within the thought bubble, and
toward the narrative box—what some comics’ artists and critics have called the “diegetic horizon”—placed variously atop
or within the comics page. The shift from the thought bubble
imbricated as part of the image cluster on the comics panel, to
a narrative box, shifts the reader’s focus from the character to
disembodied reflective narration. The reader turns from the
spontaneous interior life of the character to an overarching
narrative voice, many times the voice of the character—not an
omniscient narrator—but disembodied and separate from the
character thinking. The diegetic horizon serves as a frame for
the story, but not a spontaneous stopping point or an entry
point into the character. As Hillary Chute remarks, “the diegetic
horizon of each page made up of what are essentially boxes of
time, lends graphic narratives a representational mode capable
of taking up complex political and historical issues with an
explicit, formal degree of self-awareness” (2010, p. 9). Some
version of such a box serves a story telling function; it provides
characters’ reflections and memory but necessarily removes
internal association, feeling, or fantasy that is impulse driven,
or unmediated. Such material is boxed in and controlled by a
narrative function, marking it as a reflection but not freely associative. This shift away from a plain and immediate depiction
of thought and toward a more delayed, remembered reflective
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narration in comic books and graphic narratives, so prevalent
in recent decades suggests an important trend that is displaying
a shift in the depiction, description and desire of the human
subject within comics. Of course, comics remains invested in
the depiction of thought through diegetic narrators, but they
lead the story, controlling and interpreting thought through
a narrative presence; they do not offer the spontaneous, free
associative thought that the bubble “floats”—bubble to bubble.
The shift away from the thought bubble is more than a
new style of characterization; it marks a new style of comics,
which reflects our contemporary relationship with thought. The
loss of the thought bubble impacts reader’s response and the
affective range of comics capacity. What’s more, the resistance
to the thought bubble enacts a kind of repetition compulsion,
of what Christopher Pizzino has called an “autoclasm,” or a
breakdown through traumatic inhibition or arrest (2016). Such
autoclasm harkens back to early repression and denigration of
comics as a medium that predicated a radical and traumatic
blow to this “sensational” and “sentimental form” of literature.10
The autoclasm is not just in the stories that comics tell, but
in the shapes of comics itself. The point here is not to eschew
the inevitable new shapes and sizes of the narrative box or
any of the infinitely various new styles or fashions of comics
creativity, some of which recently have bled from the bubbles
and balloons, unconstrained, into all corners of the page in an
extraordinary and fecund revision of the forms of the comic
book page. Thi Bui’s evocative rendering of the bubbles of
dream are captured in a literal landscape of memory, drawing
from comics history and innovating with astounding artistry
how dream bubbles bring breath to her young child-self (Figure
8). Innovation of all sorts keeps the medium exciting and vital,
quite obviously, but such control explicitly signals a “necessary”
avoidance of a familiar and even revered form for containing
thought in a shape that has lost its “cool” appeal.11 Drawing
upon such historiography of comics informed by psychoanalytic theories of both repression and resistance, my suggestion
is that the above mentioned New York Times article on the ways
the graphic design of messaging platforms soften textual communication through the bubble is actually on to something
Vera J. Camden
Figure 8. Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do, 2017, p. 89.
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about the effect of this shape, something that is endemic to
comics history and essential to its literary and artistic hold over
our imaginations. Let us consider, then,a story told by Stephen
King who was instructed to “cut” the thought bubble from his
foray into comics writing American Vampire comics for Vertigo,
an imprint of DC Comics (Figure 9).
In an interview with the Daily Beast, King notes he had as
a kid read Superman, Batman, and early EC Comics, so upon
being asked to write a comic book story, he drew from these
early comics for his story in American Vampire. Unbeknownst to
King, though, the signature device of comics that dominated
the early forms of his youth no longer prevailed. He was told
to eliminate the thought bubble. In the interview, King states,
I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying,
“Ah, Steve, we don’t do that anymore.” “You don’t do that
anymore?” I said. “No, when the characters speak, they
speak. If they’re thinking, you try to put that across in the
narration, in the little narration boxes.” (Donnelly, 2010)
So, King rewrote his comic to fit the new style—though he still
laments the loss of the thought bubble. “I think it’s a shame to
lose that arrow out of your quiver” (Donnelly, 2010). But more
importantly, King’s use of the word “embarrassed” to describe
the phone call reveals something about how the mainstream
comics companies feel about the bubble. Comics creator,
Benjamin Marra remarks upon Stephen King’s loss of the use
of the thought bubble in an interview for GQ capturing this
feeling as he states,
in an effort to make comics seem or appear more adult
or legitimate and less like a comic book, they’ve gotten
rid of thought balloons altogether, because they’re too
iconographic—they reference peoples’ stereotypes of
what a comic book is, while they’re reading it. I think
that comic makers or publishing houses are afraid that
readers might be quick to dismiss what they’re reading
if they see a thought balloon in it. It’s really strange to
me. (Pappademas, 2010)
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There are several possible reasons for editors excising the
thought bubble that these creators already identify. Perhaps
thought bubbles seem “patronizing” because they spell out the
obvious and detract from the energy of action. Scott McCloud
himself has turned away from this device:
The thought balloon, regardless of shape or style, just by
virtue of its pointer, brings a third party into the relationship: the author, gently putting his/her hand on our
shoulder and pointing to the face of the thinker with the
words “he thought.” Maybe thoughts are just too private
for that kind of parental intrusion. (2010)
McCloud’s word choice bears our analysis: for if there is anything that will kill what is cool it is parental intrusion. He
claims it is the “pointer” of the thought bubble that pokes in
and peeks at what is going on in the mind. But this is precisely
what the thought bubble does not do!12 And this is why it is
important to get the names and shapes of things sorted out.
The bubble shape depends upon the free floating, ascending,
and graduated bubbles to convey the thoughts emanating from
the character, not the pointer.
Still and all, as McCloud rightly points out, and as Thi Bui’s
evocative version of the bubble of a dream evokes the power
of the thought bubble is that it reveals what is “private.” The
idea that the character can have a private self that is defined
distinctly from their public self, the self that is presented to
other characters is an important distinction and a powerful
element of comics. Readers bear witness to the different parts
of the self that a character may have; thus, despite McCloud’s
qualms with the bubble, his turn to privacy ironically captures
the point. Thought bubbles offer a space for the private, that
is to say, the inner self.13 Thierry Groensteen (2007/1999) refers to the “balloon” in general as a “the only element of the
paginal apparatus on which the gaze definitively stops (except
when leafing through the comics without reading it).” Marc
Sumerak brings an editorial perspective from his days at Marvel
Comics to these points when he reiterates in a recent personal
interview what has now become a defining observation that the
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Figure 9. Stephen King and Rafael Albuquerque, American Vampire #1, 2010, p. 21.
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thought bubble works as a “pause on the page” (2018). Taking
away the thought bubble asks the reader to think less about the
mind of the individual who is in process of thinking— making
it a less intimate reading experience.
Some comics artists have argued against the editorial mandates in terms that illuminate our discussion. Barry Deutsch
(2010), for instance, rejects the notion that thought bubbles are
naïve. To the argument that [they are too] “cartoony” and that
“sophisticated, literary comics want to avoid” them, he points
out: “The irony, of course, is that thought [bubbles]— well
used—can be an extremely sophisticated and subtle device.
By arbitrarily cutting them out, editors may actually be making
their comics less subtle and less sophisticated.” Others, equally
illuminating, have ended up agreeing with such mandates.
Alan Moore (2008), very influentially, in the Afterword to V
for Vendetta describes a conflict with his illustrator:
Dave [Lloyd] was giving me his ideas of […] the utter
eradication of thought balloons […] As a writer, this terrified me […] without thought balloons, how was I going
to get over all the nuances of character that I needed
to make the book satisfying on a literary level? (p. 272)
Yet he gives in. As comics readers now know, V for Vendetta
was one of many of Moore’s books that did turn away from
the thought bubble, and, incidentally, shaped a generation of
creators. Brad Reed summarizes this generational influence:
My overarching theory as to why the first-person narration
caption took over for the thought balloon is that as the
superhero genre aged, the effects created by first-person
captions became better understood and appreciated, and
the thought bubble’s immediacy and flavor of artificiality
lost its appeal. (2015)
In an interview, Marc Sumerak (2018) spoke to the fact that
the thought bubble was put on a shelf along with many other
elements of the comics page including the editorial notes, all
in an effort to make way for the artists and focus on the com-
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ics’ artists ability to tell a story. The editors wanted less clutter,
more open space. This point is reiterated by Benjamin Marra
(Klaehn, 2019), who I cite at length here on the subject of
mainstream comics and the drives of the marketplace:
mainstream comics insist on having “widescreen” panels
so movie producers can better visualise them as films. Prohibiting thought balloons because they made the comic
look too much like comics and thought balloons can’t be
easily translated to film. In essence these practices are an
expression of comics’ self-hatred. Nine-panel grids and
thought balloons worked for some of the best stories ever
told in the medium. Sacrificing tools that make comics
a powerful storytelling medium in the hopes they might
be blessed by a Hollywood studio. And I guess that has
come true. (p. 8)
This may create a “cooler” depiction of comics. Despite the
push to render comics more seamless, cool and impermeable
to raw rendering of internal thought and fantasy, the particular
and blatant rendering of what is thought but not expressed may
be harder to drive out than controlling editorial teams might
imagine. Production companies may indeed push the thought
bubble away, but comics is an art of memory. The repressed,
as we should know by now, will always return.
The Shape of the Bubble
Comics has been, up until recently, shamefully associated
with the juvenile (Pizzino, 2016, p. 73),14 however much they
are now dominating the “conversation about literature and the
self” (Chute, 2010, p. 26). A psychoanalytic interpretation of
such relegation of comics to the realm of childhood will on the
one hand agree: comics were, after all, banished and censored
historically precisely because they had such magnetic power
over children and thus such influence.15 Comics do appeal to
the child in the view of whatever age because, on the other
hand, as a medium they draw upon childhood attachment to
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image and prelinguistic affective states. Indeed, Leslie Fiedler
during the 1950s “witch hunt” against comics defended the
victimized comics medium in terms that resonate with my argument. He opined that comics “remain close to the impulsive
subliminal life [. . .] Behind the opposition to [such] vulgar
literature, there is at work the [. . .] fear of the archetypal and
unconscious itself [. . .]” (1955, pp. 19–20). As such, the thought
bubble takes on a particularly suggestive place in the experience and the evolution of the comics medium. The shape of
the bubble, in its soft and friendly way, offers a visual analogue
to an emergent internal voice, bodily sense of containment,
and the inner self. The shape of the thought bubble calls up
the preverbal, infantile forms that developmentally adumbrate
the emergence of speech in the growing child: from thought
to word. Or as Lynda Barry puts it, comics “can raise the dead
hours inside of us that nothing else can reach” (2008, p. 136).
This “force field” (Chute, 2016, p. 168) leads directly to the
core appeal of the thought bubble.
This reach of comics invokes Julia Kristeva’s formulation
of the semiotic chora behind yet also beyond linguistic speech,
which relies on an image of internal space to capture that place
located in the maternal body. The chora preexists the linguistic
sign or the paternal signifier, redeeming the maternal in psychoanalytic thought.16 Her diverse depictions of the fate of the
chora in “primal repression” offers uncanny resonance to the
travails of the thought bubble—but also to its persistent appeal.
Let us enter, for a moment, into that Freudian aporia
called primal repression. Curious primacy, where what is
repressed cannot really be held down, and where what
represses already borrows its strength and authority
from what is apparently very secondary: language. Let us
therefore not speak of primacy but of the instability of
the symbolic function in its most significant aspect—the
prohibition placed on the maternal body (as a defense
against autoeroticism and incest taboo). Here, drives
hold sway and constitute a strange space that I shall
name, after Plato (Timeus, 48–53), a chora, a receptacle.
(Kristeva, 1982, pp. 13–14)
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The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
Kristeva further states that the chora remains “unnamable,
improbably, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, to the
father, and consequently, maternally connoted” (1980, p. 133).
Kristeva’s depiction of the chora partakes of the hybridity associated with the medium of comics, forever in tension between
image and word, but also for the “strange space” of the chora
connoting the maternal body. By such lights, the thought bubble
in its maternal shape and in its function of depicting thought
“anterior” to dialogue and even narration, partakes of the
chora’s power, while it also endures its formal repression. And
the bubble shape itself resonates with the body whose contours
may be interpreted from its dimensions—whether like the
brain folded and segmented or the more aesthetically inviting
breast whose shape is both round and pointed at the same time.
Thus, while the bracketed narrative boxes may indeed herald
a shift in the evolution of comics through a narrative voice of
authority, irony and omniscience,17 the explicit distancing of
comics from the soft, naïve, or childlike expressions of kitsch
ironically cuts off comics from its reference to a psychic energy
core. The very form and structure of the comics’ page depends
upon this signature device, insofar as the very body of the panels
and pages document traumatic memory. Its abolishment runs
the risk of casting off its affective impact.
Once again Pizzino’s influential notion of the autoclasm
reminds us that the memory of traumatic breakdown remains
indelibly written into the very narrative structure and preoccupations of comics as a medium. Since comics as a cultural form
came to be associated with children and, inevitably, juvenile
delinquency resulting in the crackdown on comics instigated
and carried forth in the clinical diatribes of Fredric Wertham
(1954), this association is now repeated and imprinted in the
very generic evolution of comics today, retaining all the traces
of that political purge.18 While Pizzino does not take up the ways
that the structure of the comics itself—the mechanisms of its
visual and material shaping—also reflect this cultural trauma,
it seems to me that the evolving architecture of comics page
itself can reveal a similar history of breakdown. But taking his
conception of traumatic memory one step further one can
recognize, in the banishing of the bubble through editorial
Vera J. Camden
627
mandates and fashionable trends, a repetition compulsion.19
The crackdown and breakdown endemic to comics history is
repeated on the comics page. In this regard, D. W. Winnicott’s
description of the “fear of breakdown” in clinical practice
resonates with Pizzino’s notions when he writes, “I contend
that clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has
already been experienced. It is a fear of the original agony which
caused the defence organization which the patient displays
as an illness syndrome” (1974, p. 104). Thus, in the world of
comics, the editorial purge, the dread of the thought bubble
as a childish device becomes a presenting fear of a breakdown
that has already occurred. The troubled condition of comics is
thus drawn out, paradoxically by cutting off from the body of
the comics page the kind of spontaneous memory associations
that are registered in thought bubbles. And in this sense comics as a medium becomes a register of contemporary culture
in both its resistance to and registration of cultural memory.
Only Resist
If “[c]omics chronicle the twilight world, the liminal space
between past and present, text and image, creator and reader”
(Gardner, 2012, p. 176), then Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns
(2008), a compilation of early work coupled with retrospective
comics dramatizes his own creative processes over the years,
captures the link between memory, time, and thought. His
pervasive and persistent uses of the thought bubble afford us
an opportunity to introduce representative instances of how
many comics artists resist the trend away from the thought
bubble and thus not only retain its formal attributes in their
work, but also retain access to its psychological power. In one
vignette, Spiegelman creates a narrative of “Memory Hole,” an
invisible man who is shown as a hat without a head (Figures 10
and 11). In this comics vignette, Memory becomes an allegorical figure, a yet-to-emerge “invisible art” (McCloud, 1993) who
haunts the comics artist as a young man, striving to create his
famous memoir, Maus.
628
The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
Figure 10. Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns, 2008, p. 9.
Figure 11. Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns, 2008, p. 10.
Depicted as a hard-boiled Dick Tracy, “Memory” mocks the
cry-baby Spiegelman in his search for origins and, indeed, for
originality. The action of this vignette moves through thought
bubbles that capture the sneering impressions of the detective who follows the artist around, as he is “ducking from one
memory to another trying to locate the moments that shaped
and misshaped him” all the way back to the inchoate cries of
infancy (2008, pp. 10–11). The detective’s thoughts mock the
artist’s memory quest, while tormenting him with speech that
shows contempt for such “navel gazing.” Spiegelman captures
the interaction of both thought and speech in memory’s bubble,
in a manner reminiscent of Sina Grace’s more self-conscious
Vera J. Camden
629
parallel columns. The cynical memory detective who stalks Art’s
every move warns him that both he and the planet are “running out of time.” Art’s response is reported by the memory
detective for whom snatches of speech stick in the thought
bubble. “‘Time’, he sighed, ‘Comics are time, time turned into
space!’” The detective then reports, “I kicked him in the navel,
and faded back into the shadows” (2008, p. 11). Spiegelman’s
dependence on the thought bubble to achieve his complex,
and yet entertaining sojourn into his self-portrait of the artist as a baby provides proof positive that independent comics
artists do not allow their creativity to be dictated by corporate
measures of cool. What is important here to consider, however,
is that the absence of the thought bubble does indeed threaten
to create a memory hole in the very form of comics.20
Despite the edicts of numerous mainstream comics editors
pushing down this comic tool, the thought bubble persists as
an access point to the interior lives of the character, regardless
of fashion trends. Perhaps it is not “cool” as some comics have
tried to become, but Roz Chast captures the strength of the
thought bubble as a tool in her appropriately titled cartoon,
“Inside-of-Body Experience” (2018). Her frazzled character
thinks to herself, “Once again here I am” (Figure 12). The title
inverts the oft used description for an overwhelming experience that left a person feeling “out of body.” As usual, Chast
succeeds at capturing everyday experiences that wear us down.
By placing this feeling in a thought bubble, Chast captures the
absurdity and the almost unspeakability of waking up once again
to overwhelming feelings. But it is the comedic nature of this
comic that also points to the thought bubble as a mechanism
for coping, a sign of resiliency. It is the inner thought, the selfcoaching that allows Chast’s character to acknowledge herself
as once again “here.” The thought bubble serves an emblem of
the self that processes the world, inside as well as outside. An
internal site, the thought bubble is also something the person
can inhabit and render through language.
The cartoonist Riad Sattouf (2015) also captures, in his
way, the power of the thought bubble as a pre-linguistic tool in
his memoir, Arab of the Future.21 The ways that Sattouf depicts
the inner life of his younger self partakes of a political trauma,
630
The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
Figure 12. Roz Chast, “Inside of Body Experience,” New Yorker, 2018.
while at the same time captures a psychological dimension of
familial trauma in the midst of cruelty and chaos as the young
boy Riad is displaced into an alien and dangerous landscape. We
witness his three-year-old appetite and his innocence captured
in a thought bubble (Figure 13). His desire is preverbal and
so the thought—the image of cake—is rendered amidst the
mother’s despair over the world her child is now inhabiting.
The thought bubble says more than mere text can say: the child
remains a child and his thoughts remain basic and appetitive.
The corporeality of internal life, both figurative and physical,
as a child desiring cake, is here paralleled alongside a world of
this family that is falling apart. Libyan society is fragmenting
around them, and yet the child’s perceptions remain available
through comics depiction, drawn from this ruin, and drawn
upon the page. Comics seek access to a “nonlinguistic, pre-
Vera J. Camden
631
Figure 13. Riad Sattouf, Arab of the Future, 2015, p. 4.
symbolic referentiality through the concretization of symbolic
meaning” (Singer, 2012, p. 17). For Riad Sattouf, the thought
bubble represents a pre-verbal sense of the self and the mind,
a feeling state that is in counterpoint to the adult narrator’s
boxes: the child’s thought is free, and in some ways, more raw,
and more powerful.
The thought bubble captures not only the desire of the
child, but by virtue of the larger narrative also anticipates the
reflections of the adult.22 In a recent series of panels in the
PMLA, Alison Bechdel (2019) draws upon the thought bubble
to reflect upon her similar appetitive desire (Figure 14). The use
of the thought bubble here serves as both a resolution to the
questions she asks in the panels, but also a form of resistance to
the structure of comics that has moved to eliminate spontaneous
thought. Her use of the thought bubble to depict one of the
most basic of desires, not far from that of the childish Sattouf,
points to the power of this grammatical tool as an access point.
She reveals that she may indeed have other thoughts about
the subject matter. Bechdel’s use of the thought bubble here
returns us to Sattouf as the thought bubble does not solely exist
within the realm of cognition but rather captures the affective
ranges of desire, and in fact thrives when used to identify such
an early desire as hunger. Here the thought bubble is a pause
on the page that overlays the middle-aged Bechdel and the
child Sattouf, pointing to the bubble as an access to not only
632
The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
Figure 14. Alison Bechdel, “Why Comics? A Question,” 2019, p. 571.
internal life but also that which falls outside of the strictures
of language. Bechdel aspires in a critical and academic forum
to explain but also preserve comics as an hybrid domain that
challenges the viewer in direct and visceral ways to reckon with
interiority. She does not navigate away from thoughts, feelings,
and fantasies.
Inside Out
Nick Sousanis’ recent PMLA graphic essay “Frames of
Thought” (2018) depicts, through comics, a new way of conveying knowledge: he relies on the use of the thought bubble to
capture not only the idea of thought as emerging from within
but also the process of drawing as a mode of discovering our
thoughts themselves (Figure 15), through creativity. In doing
so he surely provides a map not only to discover “who we’ve
been and who we will become” but also reaffirms with a peculiar
theoretical elegance the centrality, the place and the power
of the thought bubble along the way. Sousanis’ panels in the
Vera J. Camden
Figure 15. Nick Sousanis, “Frames of Thought,” 2018, p. 128.
633
634
The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
PMLA offer a concluding contribution to this consideration of
the place of the thought bubble in comics creation because
he both allows for its literal centrality to his dramatization of
the process and the art of creating comics as well as creating
human meaning.
This process draws a trace from inside out: “Beginning in
motion/Drawing preserves a trace of something internal externally.” Sousanis uniquely draws us into the process of creating
the thought bubble itself as he offers us the hand of the cartoonist to provide the mediation between inside and out. The
motion evolves from a kind of milky way of particles to a line
that becomes a flow of impulse between inside and out, now
bridged by the construction of the thought bubble, made to
contain the thoughts of Auguste Rodin’s, “The Thinker” himself. Though diminutive in the drawing, he is the representative
of the comic character who posits the fundamental question
of the origin of thought itself. And while the creative hand of
the cartoonist looms over the page centering this existential
conundrum, several narrative boxes seem to speak for Sousanis
himself who has designed another comic challenge: “Can we
[. . .] recognize [art]as a fundamental strand to what made
and makes us human, not an afterthought or alternative, but
integral?” Sousanis makes a plea for the place of art in society
as integral to our health and humanity, even as he re-centers
thought at the core of comics. Thus, by putting thought back
on the inside of comics, we aspire to remain attuned to the
inner lives of ourselves and others.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
See Ben Saunders discussion of Spider-Man, whose anxiety motivated his heroism
(2011, pp. 72–103). The thought bubble was the perfect device to capture the
conflicts of this new character.
I am indebted to Valentino Zullo for his inspiration and expertise on the vicissitudes of the thought bubble in comics history.
Of course, there have been other uses of thought bubble, including writers
utilizing this grammatical tool of comics to “tell” rather than “show” the reader
what was happening in the art as the character narrated the event, creating some
redundancy. This might happen, for example, in the Spider-Man image above
because the comic was likely created using the “Marvel Method” where the writer
would provide a brief outline that the artist would then draw followed by the
writer using thought bubbles and speech balloons to tell the story. See Yockey
(2017, pp. 15–17).
Vera J. Camden
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14
15.
16.
635
The language of psychoanalysis that pervaded popular U.S. culture after the
Second World War provided comics creators with a vocabulary to describe the
terrors of the mind, a new arena after the establishment of the Comics Code
Authority (Zullo, 2020, pp. 77–118).
What Green points to here is a plenitude of options for the comics artist. He
does not privilege the thought bubble over any other grammatical tool of comics,
but rather recognizes that its special access to his inner conflicts.
See, for instance, Bollas’ chapter on “New Forms of Thinking” in Meaning and
Melancholia (2018, pp. 58–65).
Comics pioneer Will Eisner has called the format of the speech balloon a “desperation device” that struggles to capture sound in a soundless medium (Eisner,
1985, p. 26).
Thierry Smolderen identifies the birth of the speech balloon in the Yellow Kid
(2014, p. 143). Others have located the art of speech in a balloon as having
emerged in the medieval or early modern period, see Ezell (2018) and Kunzle
(1973).
In a roundtable (Starkings, 2005) published on the blog “Balloon Tales,” comics
veterans including John Ostrander, Kurt Busiek and others discuss the erasure
of the thought bubble in contemporary comics. Ostrander remarks, “I once had
an editor who told me I couldn’t use thought balloons because they didn’t have
them in movies. […] Then the defense was that I couldn’t use them because
some writers—not me, of course—used them badly. So, any technique that is
used badly can no longer be used? The editor just stopped listening.” Busiek also
notes, “Eschewing thought balloons as a creative choice can result in interesting
approaches. Eschewing them as a blanket formula, though, is just dumb.” Later
in the roundtable Busiek states, “I was also told that the EIC and publisher [at
Marvel] hated them and looked adversely on creators that used them.”
Pizzino describes how “through autoclasm, creators picture the disenfranchisement that, to one degree or another, comes with the very act of making comics.
Against the mainstream narrative, in which at least some graphic novelists can
transcend the stigma of immaturity and vulgarity attached to comics, autoclasm
testifies to a struggle with problems of status that binds creators across many
genres and production models” (2016, p. 5).
For a discussion of the turn to being “cool,” as a refusal and denigration of
intimacy, see Fraiman (2003) and Camden (2007).
In Making Comics, McCloud uses the thought bubble in his section “Inner Life”
to show the desire of the four famous figures from The Wizard of Oz. He states,
“We can add to a character’s personality all we want—make them kind-hearted
or witty or sentimental or neurotic—it’s only when they start to want something
that those traits are set in motion and given purpose” (2011, p. 67). In order to
show the inner life of these characters he gives them each a thought bubble with
their desire: a brain, a heart, courage, and, of course, home.
Neil Cohn refers to the thought bubble as one expression of “private carriers”
(2013, p. 36) in comics—the surface representations language in comics that are
not accessible to others in the comic. He employs “Theory of Mind” to describe
how thought bubbles “recognize the existence of mental states in other people.
We know that other people have thoughts, and we interact with them on the
basis of that knowledge” (2013, pp. 109–110).
Pizinno regrets current trends that repudiate the childish appeal of comics:
“There is something immature about the obsession with maturity and something
sophisticated about deliberate recourse to the seemingly juvenile” (Pizzino, 2016,
p. 51).
For this history, see the Introduction to this issue, “Comics on the Couch.”
Kristeva corrects Freudian phallocentrism. First clinically analyzed in Judith
Kestenberg’s essay on the “Inner Genital Sensations,” (1982) it is now virtually
commonplace to acknowledge the neglect of the female genital famously inflicted on generations of analysands by Freud’s doctrines of phallic primacy and
636
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes
the fantasy of a one-sex model of desire. The founding Freudian fathers’ fear
of the feminine and, more generally, male envy of female reproductive organs
has generated feminist counter-narratives of inner space and fecundity (Olfman,
1994). See also Camden (2016).
To be sure, the diegetic box creates a window into the heart, mind and soul of
the characters, bearing a relation to Jane Austen’s innovative uses of “free indirect
discourse” (Flavin, 1987).
On Wertham and his complex relationship to comics, psychoanalysis, and the
development of American democracy in the twentieth century, see Beaty (2005),
Mendes (2015), Zullo (2020).
Freud describes this psychological pattern of acting out the trauma rather than
remembering it in his essay, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”
(1958 [1914]).
An internet search of thought bubbles (or thought balloons) leads to countless
forums on the loss of this piece of comics architecture. Pages appear on Reddit,
and others, including “Quarter to Three” or “Comic Vine.” Brian Raghoobur
(2009) writes a blog in defense of the thought bubble on “Den of Geek.” There
is also a popular convention in the UK every year simply called “Thought Bubble”
(Kennedy, 2017). Such is the resistance and refusal to ignore this icon of comics.
In a chapter entitled “The Language of Comics,” Darren Hudson Hick (2012,
p. 141, note 13) refers to the ways that in series like Peanuts or Garfield, the distinction between thought and speech is eroded as the animals here use thought
bubbles that humans do not understand. His point furthers the idea that the
thought bubble captures something pre-verbal or non-verbal; it is an access point
to a world before and outside of language. This is not an elision of thought and
speech when the animals think in bubbles but rather an acknowledgment of the
parts of thought that do not reach speech.
Regarding comics capacity to render time in space and thereby capture layers
of memory, Jared Gardner notes that comics emerged in the early part of the
twentieth century in response to “[t]he need for a new graphical language to
describe the present in relation to the past is arguably more pressing than ever”
(2012, p. 178). Gardner further insists that the past is not some realm of the
uncanny but is rather something inevitably known and felt within the present—
not a gothic haunting but the meaningful traces of past presence that direct us
to our contemporary selves and to paths lead to future places and prospects.
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