Lettering is placement and reading order, not font choice. The bubble goes where the eye should travel next, the tail points at the speaker, and tails must never cross. Everything else is detail.

30 August 2026 · Panel Haus

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Lettering is placement, not font choice. The bubble goes where the eye should travel next, the tail points at whoever is speaking, and two tails must never cross. Get those three right with the plainest font available and it reads as professional. Get them wrong and no font saves it.

This is the half of comics nobody warns you about, and it is where most finished pages fall apart.

Bubbles are read before the art

The thing to understand first: a reader does not look at the picture and then find the words. Text pulls the eye, so the bubbles are read almost immediately, and the art is taken in around them.

That makes bubble placement the panel's actual reading order. You are not decorating a finished picture. You are telling the reader what to look at, in what order.

Which gives one hard rule everything else follows from: the first line spoken must be up and to the left of the second. Reading order runs left to right, top to bottom, so a reply placed above its question will be read first, and the conversation runs backwards. Readers rarely notice consciously. They just find the page confusing and blame the story.

If two characters have to speak and they are standing in the wrong order, the fix is usually the art, not the lettering. Flip the shot so the first speaker is on the left.

The tail points at the speaker

Not at their mouth. At them. A tail aimed precisely at a mouth reads as a diagram; a tail aimed at the person reads as speech.

In Panel Haus, hold T and drag, and the tail follows your cursor to any angle. Underneath, the tail is a continuous angle rather than a fixed slot, so it can point exactly where you need it. There are also nine shortcuts laid out as a three by three grid, which is really eight directions plus a centre that means no tail at all, for when the speaker is obvious or the text is narration.

Tails must never cross. This is the single most reliable tell of an amateur page. If character A is on the left, their bubble is on the left. Two tails crossing over each other tells the reader the wrong person said the line, and it happens every time bubbles are placed by where there is space rather than by who is talking.

Room to place them properly has to exist in the art, which is why leaving space when you generate the panel matters more than any lettering trick. If the panel is detailed edge to edge, you are choosing which face to cover.

Pick the right container

Nine bubble types are available, and six of them show in Simple mode, which is the right six to learn:

• Speech and Classic are the two everyday shapes. Pick one and stay with it.
• Thought and Cloud are internal. Use them rarely. Modern comics mostly put thought in captions instead.
• Caption is narration and the voice from outside the scene. It takes no tail, and it belongs in a corner, usually the top left where the eye enters.
• Shout carries volume with a jagged edge. It stops meaning anything if every third bubble is one.
• Whisper is the opposite, and is more useful than people expect for asides.

Beyond those, Draw lets you make a custom bubble shape by hand, and Plain Text puts words on the page with no container at all, which is what sound effects want.

The mistake here is variety for its own sake. A page using three bubble shapes for no reason reads as noise. Consistent containers are invisible, and invisible is the goal.

Fonts, briefly, because it matters less than you think

One lettering font for all dialogue, across the whole comic. Not one per character. If you need a character to sound different, that is what a different bubble style or a colour does, and even then, sparingly.

Traditional comic lettering is upper case, with a lower case i never used as a capital I. Modern comics increasingly use mixed case and it reads fine. Either is defensible. Switching halfway is not.

Size it so the text sits comfortably inside the bubble with an even margin all round. A bubble crammed to its edges reads as cheap faster than almost anything else on the page.

Why the tails survive export

Worth knowing if you plan to print. The tails are real vector geometry, drawn as canvas paths rather than as CSS shapes bolted onto a box. That means the tail you positioned is the tail that renders, at whatever resolution the export runs at, including the print sizes.

Lettering built out of CSS tends to look right in the browser and then arrive wrong in the PDF, which is a bad thing to discover after paying for a proof.

The mistakes worth naming

• Tails crossing. Covered above. It is the first thing an experienced reader sees.
• Bubbles covering faces. Faces carry the acting. Cover a hand, cover the sky, never cover a face.
• Bubbles touching the panel border. Leave a gutter. A bubble welded to the frame edge looks like a mistake even when it was deliberate.
• One giant bubble for a long speech. Break it into two or three linked bubbles. It gives the reader pace, and it lets the art breathe between them.
• Lettering last, as an afterthought. If you generate all your art before thinking about words, you will spend the rest of the day finding somewhere to put them.

The short version

Read the bubbles in order and make sure that order is the order the lines are spoken. Point the tail at the speaker, never across another tail. Keep faces clear. One font, consistent containers, even margins. Lettering is invisible when it is done well, and that is the whole point of it.