Speech Bubbles: Gillray Was Drawing Them in 1792

The left-hand balloon opens with “O! Sacre Dieu!”, etched in a looping hand above a man in a red cap. The French means “Oh! Holy God!” in this site’s translation. That is a speech bubble at work: an outline that holds a character’s spoken words and points to whoever says them. This one belongs to French Liberty – British Slavery, a hand-colored etching by James Gillray, and the imprint along its bottom edge dates it to December 21st, 1792.

By this site’s count, the print has two panels and two balloons, one for each speaker. So a working speech bubble appears in a print published in London about 114 years before the 1906 board behind this site’s Little Nemo page. The print does not show who started the idea, and this page does not try to name anyone.

Two balloons in one 1792 print

Gillray split the sheet down the middle. On the left, above the title FRENCH LIBERTY, a thin man in a red cap chews green stalks on a stool beside a smoky fireplace. On the right, above BRITISH SLAVERY, a heavy man in an armchair carves a huge joint of meat.

A line between the two titles reads “London. Pub.d December 21st 1792, by H Humphrey No 18 Old Bond Street.” Hannah Humphrey was the printseller who published it, and the Commons record lists her beside Gillray. Just above that line, small letters read “Js Gy. desn et fect.,” Gillray’s initials and a Latin abbreviation that this site translates as designed and made.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the sheet as 1976.602.27 and has released the image under CC0. The museum data gives the sheet as 24.9 by 35.2 centimeters, so its long side is about a quarter longer than that of a sheet of letter paper.

How Gillray’s balloons point to the speaker

Each balloon does two jobs at once. Its outline fences the words off from the rest of the picture, and its tail tells you who is talking. In the right panel the outline is a long rounded shape, and its lower edge narrows into a curving tail that ends at the bald man’s forehead, just above his eyebrow.

The words inside are a complaint about “this cursed Ministry” and its “damn’d Taxes.” The left balloon works the same way, but its tail runs down the wall, and the last line of lettering bends into it. Neither tail touches a mouth. Each one ends near the head.

The joke needs the balloons. Each speaker agrees with the title under him, and the picture says the opposite. The ragged man praises liberty and “no more Slavery,” while the well-fed man complains that the Ministry is “Starving us to Death.”

Parts of a speech bubble

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The diagram names the parts that the works on this page share. The same parts in a table:

The tail matters most when several people share a panel. Without it, you would have to guess the speaker from where the words happen to sit.

“Balloons, they are called”: a 1920 animation handbook

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An animation handbook of 1920 still called the device a balloon. E. G. Lutz’s Animated Cartoons, published in New York that year, explains how dialogue got into a cartoon. On page 78 it is done “by putting the wording on a separate piece of paper—balloons, they are called—for each case and placing it over the design.”

On page 174 Lutz calls balloons “the mouthpieces” for the characters’ dialogue, with an outline that hovers over the speakers’ heads. Gillray’s two balloons sit the same way, above and beside the heads. In the pages read here, Lutz never uses the word bubble.

Film added a problem that paper never had: the viewer cannot set the pace. Lutz ties the length of film for a balloon to how long an average viewer needs to read it. On page 175 he says each studio had its own rule for how many frames to allow per word, and the only way to judge was to have someone read the sentence and time it.

He treats a sentence on a title the same way. A title is wording shown on screen with no tail to any speaker. The 1903 catalog behind A Trip to the Moon is a different kind of title list: thirty scene names printed for buyers, with no sign of whether they reached the screen as words.

Lutz also describes a change in his own field. Early on, he writes, a speaking figure with a balloon simply stood still; by 1920 a careful artist moved the lips and arms while the lettering appeared. For how the same handbook places drawings between two poses, see 12 Principles of Animation.

A century later, on McCay’s boards

Two original comic drawings from 1906 and 1907, now in the National Gallery of Art, show balloons doing the same job on much larger boards. The 1907 board, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend: Bucking Automobile, has 18 panels and 18 balloons, one in each, by this site’s count. They are rounded boxes with a short point toward the driver, who talks to himself all the way through.

The board is signed Silas and carries the line “COPYRIGHT, 1907. BY THE NEW YORK EVENING TELEGRAM. (NEW YORK HERALD CO.).” The museum record on Commons gives the artist as Winsor McCay. The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend page reads this board on its own terms.

Panels 4 and 5, counted from the top left, show something Gillray’s two speakers never needed. The remark “A REGULAR BUCK-” breaks off at the end of panel 4 and finishes as “-ING AUTOMOBILE!” in panel 5, while the car rears up. The balloon carries one voice across the gutter, the strip of blank paper between panels.

Set beside the 1792 print, these balloons look tidier. Gillray’s outlines wander across the wall and taper into long tails, and his slanting script bends with them. On the 1906 and 1907 boards the lettering runs in straight lines of capitals inside rounded boxes, and the points are short.

The 1906 Little Nemo board is busier. This site counts 21 balloons across its 8 panels, with 6 in panel 3 alone. Its circled panel numbers fix the order of the panels, but not the order of the balloons inside each one.

Speech bubbles from 1792 to 1920

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On the timeline, the dates show a long gap rather than a starting line. Gillray’s print is about 114 years older than the Little Nemo board and about 128 years older than Lutz’s handbook. Only four works are counted here, so the chart says nothing about how common balloons were in between.

Download the balloon counts for these four works (CSV) · source and license notes