Thought Balloon

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One of the earliest antecedents to the modern speech bubble were the “speech scrolls”, wispy lines that connected first person speech to the mouths of the speakers in Mesoamerican art.

In Western graphic art, labels that reveal what a pictured figure is saying have appeared since at least the 13th century. Word balloons (also known as 'banderoles') began appearing in 18th-century printed broadsides, and political cartoons from the American Revolution often used them. With the development of the comics industry in the 20th century, the appearance of speech balloons has become increasingly standardized, though the formal conventions that have evolved in different cultures (USA as opposed to Japan, for example), can be quite distinct.

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