Repeat after me. In your head...

     ("In your head.")

No. In your head, repeat after me...

     My thought is a light, fluffy cloud.

Annnd poof!

Commence polite applause... now.

Ah, the thought balloon. In olden days, people actually used to think like that. It's true. Light, fluffy clouds would just waft out of people's ears, exposing their thoughts for the entire world to see.

By olden days, I mean a long time ago, but still more recently than the days when everything was black and white, and people used to talk like this...

(And if Great Aunt Ethel had been able to call out in a larger font, she'd still be alive today. *Sniff*)

This week in Think Like Tomorrow, we'll be thinking about thinking.

(Though, as always, we'll be doing it "like tomorrow"... Honestly, some days, I can't explain it either.)

More specifically, we'll be thinking about how thinking is graphically depicted in the comics.

Now, that could mean thought balloons, like our friend up at the top of the page.

Or, it could mean captions, for those graphic novelistas in the crowd.

(See, I can write dark and brooding. Anybody know if Schreck is still editing the Bat titles?)

Nowadays, it might mean no graphic at all:

Whatever happened to the thought balloon? Why is first person narration in danger of vanishing from comics? Why do so many of today's hottest writers hate thinking?

To answer these questions, we must first talk about something else that's only tangentially related. Journey back with me now (metaphorically) to a time long gone. A time before fluffy thought clouds or screams on black title cards. A time when movies were called "windows" and TV was called "books."

     (Metaphorically.)

A website that I googled for* says that the modern English novel was born out of the works of three authors who wrote in the early 18th century: Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson. There were several new ideas that set these authors' books apart from those who came before, but I'm only going to talk about one of them.

     Because, let's be honest, you're already starting to nod off.

The early novels provided a window (or, as we might say today, a "movie") into the human mind. For the first time in narrative, we were given access to a character's innermost thoughts, without that character needing to announce them to us, out loud.

     (See Hamlet, MacBeth, et al.)

The lesson of the novel was that people could think deep thoughts and never share them. A man or woman could think one thing and say another. Or say one thing, when they wanted nothing more than to say something else entirely.

The novel showed us how a person's interior self could be in conflict with the exterior they show the world. That there is something specific worth knowing about the things that go unsaid. That our inner voices are often more important than our outer voices.

(This should not be confused with the lesson I learned last week by watching Seasame Street: That our indoor voice is often more important than our outdoor voice. If anyone asks, I'm in with the in-crowd.)

Some scholars argue that people weren't actually able to think thoughts in their head until the novel showed them how. (That is, of course, ridiculous, but then scholars do love to argue.)

Since comics are a combination of words and pictures, it makes sense that someone would try to translate the novel's sense of (big word alert) interiority to the 4-color page. The early efforts were clumsy, though, and remained clumsy for nearly a century.

We are, of course, talking about our friend, the light, fluffy thought balloon cloud.

Now, some scholars (different, less belligerent scholars) theorize that the first speech balloons were inspired by seeing one's breath on a cold winter's day. As a trail of breath quickly became a solid bubble or balloon, the more primitive "word cloud" came to symbolize the more ethereal, UNspoken word.

If these peace-loving scholars are right, the thought balloon is actually a much purer and more natural symbol than the standard speech balloon.

     But it looks stupid.

Of course, it doesn't help that a century worth of comics writers used and abused thought balloons, filling them with obvious redundancies ("Ouch! This is hurting me!"), clunky exposition ("But if Gwen doesn't show up with Aunt May's medication soon, Doctor Octopus will conquer the world!"), and similar nonsense ("But if Mary Jane doesn't show up with Aunt May's medication soon, the Green Goblin will conquer the world!").

In short, writers would load up thought balloons with words that no human being would ever actually think.

So they looked stupid AND they were used badly. Which problem do you think they corrected first?

Captions have been around nearly as long as comics have. Or as long, depending on how you define comics. Either way, they predate word balloons--thought or speech--by many decades.

From the beginning, captions acted as the omniscient narrator of comic books, giving the reader key information that they wouldn't be able to figure out just by looking at the artwork. And very often, the captions would also give the reader lots of key information that they COULD figure out just by looking at the artwork.

Captions like "The bullets bounce off Superman's chest like rubber!" or "The rubber bounces off Superman's chest like... extra-bouncey rubber!" For example.

In the 60's, Stan Lee introduced a fun, conversational tone to his captions that has often been imitated, but never really duplicated since. Sometimes, it felt like Stan was right there under the covers with you, reading the story to you.

     Um. Or wherever you read your comics.

In the 80's, character narration captions really took off in comics like Punisher and Punisher War Journal. (And still later, in comics like  Punisher: War Zone and Punisher vs. Archie.) The main character in these comics (often the Punisher) would narrate the events of the story from some unspoken future point.

At first, these captions most often appeared in the form of journals or war journals. Later, as writers got lazier (or "more creative"), they began including these narration captions without any kind of in-story justification.

In some cases, they would still be written in past tense, as if the character was looking back, but as often as not they were written in the present tense, simply recording the character's inner monologue.

     Thought balloons in square boxes.

For a while, these narrative captions were everywhere. And sometimes "everywhere" meant "I think I can almost make out some panel underneath all these captions!"

And sometimes, in those crazy, sideways, twilight days of thought balloons and narrative captions, that meant... the two-fer.

Please understand that the dreaded thought balloon, narrative caption two-fer is almost never a good idea. And by "almost never a good idea," I mean, "never a good idea."

If you're a genius, sure, you might be able to squeeze out some clever irony (*cough*) out of this combo, but otherwise you're just multiplying the clunkiness of the storytelling by a factor of... well... two.

 But come on! That's still double clunk!

Thankfully, most writers have figured that out, and the thought two-fer is more or less extinct. Of course, the thought balloon is more or less extinct, too. Why use thought balloons when you have the super sexy narrative caption at your disposal?

And remember, you can customize the caption box, so that it looks like a diary page or a computer screen or a page from a computerized... diary. The possibilities are endless!

     And yet the narrative caption is also in danger.

Why? I blame Warren Ellis, personally. The storytelling techniques he pioneered with Byran Hitch for The Authority heavily influenced Mark Millar and Frank Quitely's Authority run and Millar and Hitch's run on Ultimates.

     And once Ultimates blew up, everyone was doing it.

The idea was to let the art do the talking. And the thinking. Ellis wanted to make comics that felt more like mini-movies. Most serious filmies really hate voice over, and it's the same idea here. If the thought balloons and narrative captions were only ever explaining the obvious, why bother? With artists like Hitch and Quitely operating at the top of their game, the images often captured more than a single line of dialogue was ever going to convey.

     Remember that whole "thousand words" thing? Yeah.

For a long time, captionless comics were the norm at Marvel. One suspects that Bill Jemas, then Marvel publisher, may have layed down a "no thought balloons or captions" edict. Even now, years later, you're still more likely to find a caption in a DC comic than you are in a Marvel.

In fact, narrative captions are beginning to make a comeback at DC, with key usage in Countdown to Infinite Crisis and, I hope I'm not being too presumptuous, Infinite Crisis. (And possibly in a very special Infinite Crisis: Aftermath one-shot.)

If you look at these modern narrative captions, you'll see why they work where others have failed in the past:

If you're interested in studying narrative captions closer, I strongly recommend the work of Geoff Johns. He does an excellent job of hitting all four of these targets.

Now, you don't have to use thought balloons, and you don't have to use narrative captions. As mentioned previously, we can learn a lot just by looking at a well-drawn panel and a speech balloon. And thank goodness for that! Because last I checked, we can't hear other people's thoughts. If we're lucky, we barely understand our own.

And that's why comics are so cool. They have the potential to be as visual and visceral as movies and still be as deep and personal as novels.

     That, and, you know, they've got Wolverine in them.

     Good caption? Bad caption?

     Think about it.

This is one of Drew's classic Think Like Tomorrow columns.