I spent some time looking through the internet for creative use of speech bubbles in modern comics, but I couldn’t find any that were quite as interesting or had quite the same meta quality as Renaissance era speech scrolls.
Many images show the scrolls coming out of peoples’ mouths, indicating that definitely represent literal speech. But in other cases, like the figure on the far left, they appear to exist as physical objects being carried. Do the scrolls exist within the world of the image, or are they merely their for the viewer/reader to see? There’s a level of abstraction to these scrolls that suggest the beginnings of modern or abstract art. Instead of simply ascribing objects and people to the concepts they’re commonly associated with like art did up until this time, the artist or illustrator adds a hint of surrealism to the picture.
At the same time, it could obviously be argued that speech scrolls lead to speech bubbles and the modern art of cartooning. Interesting that these Renaissance images could be the birth of both a kind of “high art” (modernism, surrealism, etc.) and “low art.” (cartoons, comics, graphic novels) With that said, this is the most creative use of speech bubble I could find from the 21st century, though I’m sure there are more out there.
