The Editor

Speech Bubbles & FX

Place speech bubbles, action effects, ribbons, and decorative elements anywhere on your page. All overlays are positioned freely over the panel images and can be moved, resized, rotated, and styled.

Overlay types

There are four types of overlays, each with its own toolbar button:

• Speech Bubbles — a curated set of shapes: rectangular and rounded speech bubbles, thought clouds, and clean caption boxes. Most have a tail you can flip toward whoever's speaking. Every bubble carries its own text, which automatically sizes and centres itself to fit the shape.
• Ribbons — wide decorative elements used for titles, chapter headers, emphasis bars, or caption strips.
• FX — action and impact graphics: explosion bursts, speed lines, impact stars, splatter effects.
• Text — on story pages, text lives inside speech bubbles (above). A standalone Text tool for free-standing titles and captions is available on the Cover, and whenever you detach the text from a bubble — see Text & Captions.

Placing an overlay

1. Click the relevant icon in the left toolbar (bubble, ribbon, or FX)
2. A picker opens — scroll through the options and click the shape you want
3. The cursor changes to a crosshair — you're now in stamp mode
4. A ghost preview follows your mouse at 50% opacity so you can see exactly where it will land
5. Click anywhere on the canvas to place the overlay at that position
6. Press Escape to exit stamp mode without placing

You can place multiple overlays in a row — after placing one, you stay in stamp mode. Press Escape when you're done.

Selecting and moving

Click any overlay to select it. Selection shows corner resize handles and a rotation handle. While selected, the left properties panel opens with styling options.

• Move — click and drag the overlay body
• Resize — drag any corner handle (nw, ne, se, sw)
• Rotate — drag the rotation handle (appears above the selection box)
• Delete — press Delete or Backspace, or use the delete button in the properties panel

Styling overlays

When a bubble, ribbon, or FX element is selected, the left panel shows:

• Background — the fill colour inside the bubble. Click a preset swatch or use the custom colour picker. Default: white.
• Stroke — the outline/border colour. Default: black. Set it to match the background for a borderless look.
• Opacity — 0 (invisible) to 100% (fully opaque). Useful for subtle background overlays.
• Flip Horizontal — mirrors the overlay left-to-right. Essential for pointing a bubble tail toward characters on the other side.
• Flip Vertical — mirrors top-to-bottom. Useful for bottom-pointing tails or inverted effects.
• Rotate — drag the rotation handle above the selection box to spin the overlay to any angle.

Adding text to a bubble

Every speech bubble carries its own text. Select the bubble and a Text field appears in the left panel — type there, or double-click the bubble on the canvas and type directly. Press Escape or click outside to finish.

Your text automatically sizes and centres itself to fit the bubble's shape, in a clean comic-lettering font — there's nothing to configure, and the fit updates live as you resize the bubble. This keeps lettering consistent across your whole story and readable at any size.

Layer order

Overlays stack in the order they were placed — newer overlays appear on top. If you need to change the stacking order, delete and re-place the overlay at the desired point in time, or use the z-order controls in the properties panel if available.

Autosave

Every move, resize, rotate, style change, and text edit is saved automatically with a 500ms debounce. There is no manual save needed. When you switch pages, any pending saves are flushed immediately so nothing is lost.