Word Balloons is a new blog which aims to be the daily morning read for kids comics. Tt’s edited by Brigid Alverson, so that’s a good start. She’s aided by Katherine Dacey, Lori Henderson, Esther Keller, Eva Volin and Snow Wildsmith, a merry band of writers and librarians whom we intend to read avidly. The blog kicks off with an interview with Jerzy Drozd of Sugary Serials.

“In Saturday morning cartoons, as well as in the ’60s comics, you had very limited space to tell the full story,” he says. “How are you going to communicate characters in an economical fashion while avoiding simplifying? You want them to feel like rich characters, but you don’t have much time. So you turn up the volume on the characters to 11.” That means making every word count. “You can’t write whimsical dialogue,” he says. “You have to ask yourself ‘How is it servicing the story and the character?’”

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