Interrupting Word Balloons

The panels above come from the first page of the first issue of Y: The Last Man, scripted by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Pia Guerra, and--most important for today's observation--lettered by Clem Robins.

I was struck by how the speech balloons overlap greatly to show the characters interrupting each other. One balloon doesn't just encroach on another's border, which is common, but actually obscures some words inside, which isn't--at least in mainstream American comics.

I'd been thinking about how to use word-balloon graphics to indicate background speech when I read this story, so it was nifty to see such a technique in use.

But then it disappeared from the book. I don't know if editors didn't like it, or readers didn't get it, or the creators decided it was a failed experiment.

In this online discussion about lettering technique, Robins explained how he changes his usual method of working with a digital file as he creates overlapping balloons:

my normal layers are

text
balloons
spare clipping mask
info
page numbers
artwork
croplines

but for overlapping dialogue, i add six layers to this, and it becomes

text (top)
balloons (top)
text (middle)
balloons (middle)
text (bottom)
balloons (bottom)
spare clipping mask
info
page numbers
artwork
croplines

So that might explain why Vaughan and Robins moved away from the technique. It could have been too much extra work.