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As graphic novels are moving into mainstream publishing, something small, bolding words, has come up in conversations lately for me. So, figured I would tweet out my thoughts on it.
Prose novels don't usually use italics or bolds to emphasize and the industry has been used to that standard. So, when we come in adding bolds, I think it confuses most MS editors.
In a visual medium, like comics, we have the ability to do things prose novels don't. We don't have to describe scenes and we can mark out important words in a sentence by bolding them.
Bolds can mark an important name, or help the reader inflect the sentence as the writer Intended, but there's one important thing bolds do that seems to get lost.
In this visual medium, bolds in a word balloon add visual variety and can change a solid block of text into something as visually interesting as the art around it.
Text and word balloons don't live in a vacuum on the page. They should all work together to tell an interesting visual story even down to the bolds.
