The stylistic function of direct thought and speech in the word box is significantly different from that of the thought balloon. The word box is less integrated in diegetic space, and has historically always been home to comments by the extradiegetic narrator. Note that the word box is usually placed in the upper left corner of the image, lined with the frame, while balloons are placed in a location convenient for the image. Direct thought in a thought cloud is always simultaneous; the narrator allows us a glimpse of a character’s thoughts. However, inside a word box direct thought usually takes a more retrospective mood, as if it were narrated after the events portrayed. It has already been noted that direct thought was rather rare in movies. The equivalent of word box comments in film, retrospective comments in voice-over, is more common. We shall call it retrospective thought. Retrospective thought is usually not synchronous to the action and is more restrained in its graphic applications.

Subjective Use of Word and Image

David B.’s l’Ascension du Haut Mal features a good example of the functional difference between word boxes and thought clouds. Most of the comic’s images are accompanied by word boxes, in which an older narrator looks back on his youth. The sentences are all in the first person and in the present tense, but the vocabulary and distance in the sentences clearly indicates these comments are not synchronous to the action. It is a clear example of retrospective thought. In the fifth panel of page 33 (figure 1) we see the main characters, two brothers, sitting on a table. They have agreed the older brother will write a war story, while the younger brother (the younger version of the narrator) will draw pictures for it. The accompanying word box reads: ‘Il est l’aîné, je lui fait confiance. Il écrit et je dessine des massacres’. In the picture, we see the younger brother with a thought cloud over his head, reading: ‘BOUM! Les boulets déchiquètent les hussards…’. The first comment is more an explanation of the image, while the second is a direct representation of the young David’s thoughts while he is drawing. We can easily imagine him drawing the explosions and thinking ‘BOUM!’. The word boxes houses comments of an extradiegetic, and the thought cloud of an intradiegetic narrator here (both are homodiegetic).

However, the word box surely does not necessarily contain extradiegetic comments. This is merely a convention, and breaking conventions is one of art’s traditions. In the first 11 pages of the Fantastic Four story (figures 2-12), Byrne tells us how the Trapster tries to break into the heroes’ headquarters. Let us look at the first three pages for now. Most images are accompanied by white word boxes. The position of the arms is one of the hints that allow us to infer that the images are from a character’s perceptual point of view. The word boxes are not always placed neatly in the upper left corner, where one would expect. The boxed words in the first three panels on page 3 reads ‘Down!’, ‘Now gotta eighty-six [dispose of] these balloons before some passin’ super-do-gooder sees ‘em an’ comes to investigate.’, ‘There now…’, ‘Whassat?’ and ‘Blast, some kind of security eye-ball, I bet. Must be new. Wasn’t here last time’. The comments here are definitely not retrospective. The very opposite is true: the words presented here are an attempt at a naturalistic and simultaneous representation of the thought process. Notice how the ‘There now…’ comment gets interrupted by the surprise over the security system. In his next comment, ‘Whassat?’, the pasting of the words together conveys the speeding up of his thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness-like way. The words are also written in popular dialect, as the ‘eighty-six’ comment makes clear. On these pages, the reader has to establish the link between the comments and the images; the word boxes have no tails pointing to a particular character. The relation is not ambiguous however, the comments on the landing and the gun make obvious that the perceptual point of view accords with the verbal first person.