The oldest text balloons?
Text balloons became popular in american comics in the beginning of the 20th century. Europe was a bit later to adopt the text balloon as a tool in comics. In the 1950s, european comics with text balloons did exist, but there were also a lot of comics with the text under the pictures, rather than in the pictures. In the 1960s, comics with textballoons became the dominant comic form in Europe.
So before the 20th century, text balloons were not very popular. They did exist, it's just that they were rare.

Here are some very old expamples of textbelloons.

	Discoverie of witches dates from 1645. In this picture two persons, a female and a male witch, speak through scrolls coming out of their mouth. The woman says "holt", but I have no idea what that means. The man reveals his imps' names. In the top of the picture is a witch hunter. In the bottom are some magically deformed animals or demons.
Le chevalier delibere, or the Resolute knight, dating from around 1500. The scroll coming out of the knight's mouts says: "le chevalier delibere". This is not what the knight says, this is who the knight is. So the scroll here does not function as a modern text balloon. Death however, seems to use his scroll for speaking words. Like a real textballoon. I tried to decipher what exactly Death is saying, but I did not succeed.
	In this painting from 1450, the scrolls do not appear from the persons' mouths, but from their hands. Unfortunately, I can't read what they are saying.

The oldest jokes in the world. The oldest known jokes to be written down, 2000 to 4000 years old.
Religion for rats. Are humans really the creators of the world?
Beardless crusaders On prejudice, manhood, and cultural differences in the 11th century.
Pazuzu. Assyrian god or demon, or, most likely, both.
About elves and dwarves. Are dwarves really a subrace of the elves?

These articles are all written by me. These articles are brought to you as useless information, and they pretend to be nothing more than that.
Not everything I state in these articles is nessecarily true. But it is not all untrue either.

Coen de Moor