Comics is (with some experimentation aside) a silent medium, that is to say… well, that we don’t hear what they say. Characters “talk” by way of printed words on the page and what voice they have is pieced together in the reader’s mind. It shares this feature with prose, which occasionally makes for a jarring audio book experience as the person you’ve spent years “hearing” one way turns out to have a very different interpretation in the author’s head.

Zombie Ranch is in no way immune to this. I write the characters with a definite voice for each because I feel it’s very important to get their particular cadence and personality across even if the end result still depends on a reader’s interpretation. Actually check that, it’s more than a feeling, it’s a downright necessity. Why? Off-panel dialogue.

The recent pages have been indulging in this a lot, and I’m hoping it hasn’t been a confusing mess to try to parse out. Off-panel dialogue means the “balloon” is coming from a source not depicted in the panel itself, and without an actual voice to hear it can be tricky to clue the reader in as to who the source is. I do have several tricks up my sleeve in regards to this, for example…

…using ellipses to chain together dialogue between a panel where the source is pictured and where they are not. This may not be a grammatically proper method but I think it definitely helps to indicate a continuation of speech. On the other hand there are times I still use ellipses as a “trailing off” indicator as well, which would be the exact opposite (a stoppage of speech). Are readers getting confused by that? I don’t hear complaints, but it’s possible people are just being polite and/or not feeling it worth complaining about for a free webcomic. Understandable. Commendable, even.

But still, I do try. My other main cheat is names, but it’s easy to overuse that. People don’t tend to constantly call each other by name during a conversation. Except when they do, like the Sheriff’s particular habit of constantly wanting to check in with Jimmy.

and  other main way is like I said above, giving (or at least trying to give) each character an individual voice. Voices for the voiceless. As noted above it’s a happy byproduct of something I’m already doing. “Shitfire” is an epithet that only gets used by Suzie (and her late lamented pa), so if that’s part of an off-panel dialogue that would be a big raging clue that Suzie’s the source. Oscar is the only one who calls Frank “chief” and Suzie “big boss” as go-to nicknames. Lacey has her “yugh” and “HO-lee crap!”. Iphigenia Langhorne calls everyone “darling” like it’s going out of style. Frank’s speech is as clipped and to the point as The Exec’s is long-winded and sociopathically philosophical. Deputy Jimmy likes to rhyme a lot of the time. Eustace has a bit of a stutter and every statement he makes tends to sound like a plea. Brett… well Brett’s a bit slow on the uptake, if you catch my drift (he probably didn’t).

Some of these characters have never met and quite possibly never will, so it’s not as important to be able to distinguish between them. For those closer at hand, all these little verbal tics and cadences hopefully serve as a “who’s who” guide when the balloon tails have a point, but don’t show where they’re pointing.