Thanks to Brad Meltzer's Justice League #1, I have discovered a new rule of storytelling.
If you have an off-panel conversation, it cannot include more than two participants.
Two people's conversation can be followed easily by the simple assumption that they take turns (per Grice's fourth maxim of manner). Any more than that and the audience will be unable to keep them straight.
This holds true even when you use visual elements like color or font to identify the particular speaker, unless the visual element is extremely obtrusive. Swamp Thing-style captions might provide enough contrast. I think a font would have to actually be hard to read long before it could be distinctive enough. Color-coding is clearly insufficient. (See below.) It's conceivable that a good enough writer with characters with distinctive enough voices could make a three-way conversation followable.
In this particular case, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman discuss potential inductees for the League off-panel while we see the inductee on-panel. Their captions are distinguished only by coloring.
Note that the letterer's attempt to solve the problem does not work at all for many vision-impaired people, such as my chum who is completely colorblind, for whom all of the captions would be a uniform grey. This is an example of the well-understood phenomenon that improving something's accessibility (meaning ease of use by the handicapped) makes it more effective for everybody.
It may also be an example of the script-transparency problem, where a writer fails to realize that there's information in his script that isn't visible to the reader, and should be.
I believe I've seen letterers use little miniature logos at the beginning of the caption to identify the off-panel speaker. That works. It's bringing enough of the characters on-panel that we can distinguish them. Similarly, if their silhouettes framed the panel and their word balloons or captions pointed to their silhouettes, they wouldn't be off-panel.
Posted by Greg at September 18, 2006 6:21 PM