Telepathy bubbles?

[OnyxSerpent]

Ok. I figured out what style speech bubbles I'm going to use for my other comic, <a href=http://withoutmercy.keenspace.com>Without Mercy</a>, but I have not the slightest idea what to do about the telepathic messages that the demons use when in their "natural" forms. Since their natural forms are wolves and tigers and such things, they don't talk normally, so normal speech bubbles are quite easily ruled out. Thought bubbles are much more likely canidates, but I don't know how I could separate the telepathy bubbles from thought bubbles without doing strange things to them (aka, black bubbles with white text, but that would imply sort of that their voice was all dark and evil when it's not).

Does anyone have any suggestions for what would be a possibility?

Thanks in advance! ^^

--Oh yes, and feel free to comment about/criticize the art too if you're bored enough.

[Alaina]

You can make the bubbles with sketchy-like lines (sort of free-meandering lines that aren't quite zigzags, if you know what I mean) and you could make the words inside italic. Or a different color.

[Joel Fagin]

Free-floating bubble with not pointy bits is popular. I think I'd go for different look bubbles (however you want to do it) with pointy bits directed at the top of the skull rather than the mouth.

- Joel Fagin

[Derenge]

Once for "evil-moster-speech" I used white text on black bubble, but in retrospect I personally find this a little hokey. Different fonts and bubble styles can be distracting at times if they aren't done right. It may be good to set out to make the speech bubbles functional before cool. Most of the time I think a reader can tell what sort of voice a character is suposed to have just by looking at them.

Now to the crux of things, telepathy. I have not personally ever really had to do any telepathic communication in my comic but it seems like leaving out the triangle that indicates who is speaking could be confusing if more than one person is on the panel. Having said that using <> or [] to enclose text that is meant to be telepathy could be a good way of ear-marking what is telepathy and what is not.

Best guess seems to be experimentation. Speech bubbles are one of the fastest steps in making a comic most of the time. Doing it in more than one style and seeing which works best is really the only sure-fire way of finding something that works for you.

[Keffria]

The Foreshadowing of Roval does a nice job with telepathy bubbles...

It's more a matter of personal choice, but I wouldn't go with the use of different colours, fonts, etc., though -- I find that looks kind of, as Derenge said, hokey.

[EMH]

I use almost speech bubbles, but I add these lines all around them...example

But I guess any sort of distortion on the edge would convey that.
For example Poe adds these zig-zags. more or less like this: ___/\/----- You know what I mean, I hope.

EDIT: found some

[Reinder]

A common format for telepathy bubbles is a lozenge shape appearing over the head of the receiver. Found in Cerebus (from where I've taken the format whenever I needed to use it in Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Dave Sim of Cerebus took the basic idea from Elfquest but I think that comic used regular thought balloons with lozenge-shaped 'trails' to the sender or the receiver.

[OnyxSerpent]

Hmm. Ok. I've got some ideas now Thanks! ^^

[Ktflowerm]

What I do is probbaly not the best way, but don't say i didn't warn ya. I first make a new layer and then I use the lasso tool (photoshop by the way) and create the shape I make, it's pretty fast but I supossed to could keep some stored if i want. For telepathy I would load select or whatever and then I would use stroke. I would keep the colors unique so you could tell which was telepathy and which wasn't. Not the best way for sure, and more complicated then it needs to be I think. Yeah, it's me, the unhelpful girl.