Arrrgh! Anyone have any experience with word balloons? Willow’s inking the pages of Violet Miranda #2, and I foolishly offered to start scanning the art, and creating and placing the word balloons on each page. Turns out this isn’t as easy as you’d think if you want your comic to look halfway decent. Last issue, Kiss Machine’s designer Matt B did it for us and it was pure torture. We had the bright idea to spare him this time ’round. Lucky Matt.

First off, line drawings have to be scanned in monotone (black) and kept as vector images, which basically means working in Illustrator, I think. Then you have to add the balloons (also vector images) and text on top, and hope to hell that when you save the file you’re working on in another format, it won’t suddenly turn out to be all pixelated. We were trying to use Willow’s handdrawn balloons, but that wasn’t working too well because they’re hard to resize. Now, we’re more or less following these guidelines. Slow going…