How do you create the effect that voices are mumbled while the character is daydreaming in a comic panel? In films, you actually hear the mumbled voices while the character is daydreaming or in a sort of trance-like state. How do you achieve this in a comic panel? Is this even possible? What are some ways of achieving similar effects?
1 Answer
I've seen a couple of techniques used.
Blurry text
It's the text equivalent of the lack of camera focus that you see in movies. I've seen it a lot when a character is either groggily waking up or getting knocked out. I've also seen it used in a bit of a different context, to show that a character is drunk.
Sometimes the text is legible for anyone who squints enough, other times it's too obscured to determine so it could just be nonsense blurred.
Squiggle lines
A line like a long tilde is drawn in the speech bubble. Used for background noise in several different contexts (e.g. talking in a crowd or too far away).
Source: Half-Ghost Episode 58
"Mumble"
While novel writing eschews having this type of thing, comics seem to embrace it. (You'll also see "ha ha ha" in a speech bubble for a laughing character.) Obviously you're only going to see "mumble" in a speech bubble where the character is mumbling.
Source: Half-Ghost Episode 57
