Where do speech balloons come from, and what did the Yellow Kid have to do with it?

A speech balloon is a bit of picture grammar: a shape near a character that tells you the words inside are being said, or thought, by that character. It is so familiar that it is easy to miss how odd it is. When an American propaganda leaflet used a thought bubble during the Gulf War, Iraqi soldiers were puzzled: according to one PSYOP specialist the technique was not known there, and readers had no idea why Saddam's head was floating in the air.

The idea is old. In Mesoamerican art between 600 and 900 CE, a wispy line called a speech scroll connected a speaker's words to the speaker's mouth. In Western art, labels revealing what a pictured figure says have appeared since at least the 13th century, and by the 18th century word balloons turned up in printed broadsides. Political cartoons from the American Revolution, some published by Benjamin Franklin, often used them, as did James Gillray in Britain. Then they became disused, and by 1904 they had regained popularity, though still novel enough to need explaining.

The comeback owes a lot to a bald, barefoot boy in an oversized yellow nightshirt, the Yellow Kid. He appeared from 1895 to 1898, created by Richard F. Outcault. At first the Kid's ragged slang was printed on his shirt, a joke aimed at advertising billboards. Word balloons very much like today's were added almost immediately, as early as 1896, and Outcault's use of them influenced how balloons looked and worked in later newspaper strips and comic books.

The Kid left another mark too. The two papers that ran him, Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal, became known as the yellow papers, which is how yellow journalism got its name. Europe was slower to adopt balloons: Zig et Puce in 1925, Tintin in 1929 and Spirou in 1938 are the well-known examples.