Comics Burst Kit - 74 Retro Sunbursts, Speech Balloons, Banners & Badges (SVG + PNG)

74 retro comic shapes. Every one as a scalable SVG and a 2000px transparent PNG. 148 files.

Sunbursts, comic zoom lines, speed lines, speech balloons, banners, badge seals and vector dot gradients — the retro shape vocabulary, drawn once properly so you stop rebuilding it.

WHAT IS IN IT

12 sunbursts — 12 to 40 rays, two ray weights each

 8 comic zoom-line fields — clear centre for a face or a product, five centre placements

 8 speed-line sets — four densities, running each direction

16 speech balloons — speech, oval, thought cloud, shout burst, whisper, caption, rounded and double-outline, each with a left and a right tail

12 banners and ribbons — straight, notched, folded, wavy, arched and scroll, plain or with an inner rule

 9 badge seals — starburst splats, scalloped seals and cogs

 9 vector dot gradients — fading outward, inward and downward, at three dot pitches

Plus a START-HERE guide, a full file index, the testing notes, and the licence in plain English.

TWO FILES FOR EVERY DESIGN, AND THEY CANNOT DISAGREE

The SVG is not traced from the PNG. The PNG is not rasterised from the SVG. Both are rendered from the same computed geometry, so the two formats are two views of one source.

That matters because the usual way to sell "vector" shapes is to draw a raster and auto-trace it. Auto-tracing approximates: you get 400 nodes where 12 would do, edges that wobble, and a file that does not match the PNG beside it. Nothing here was traced, downloaded, or made by an AI image model.

THE FILENAMES ARE THE SPECIFICATION

sunburst-rays24-duty50 has exactly 24 rays, each filling half its slice.

badge-splat-points16 has exactly 16 points.

dots-fade-out-pitch24 has 24 dots across and genuinely gets sparser outward.

Those numbers are not typed by hand into a filename. A script opens each finished file, counts what is actually in it, and fails the build if the file and its name disagree.

193 CHECKS, AND THE CHECKS WERE TESTED TOO

Before the zip is allowed to build:

- Every SVG must parse, declare a viewBox, and embed no raster image. A "vector" file with a PNG hidden inside it is a real thing that gets sold, and it is not a vector file.

- Every PNG must be the exact declared size, RGBA, and genuinely transparent — not white pretending to be transparent.

- Sunbursts are rotated by one full period and must map onto themselves, AND rotated by half a period and must NOT. Without that second half the first proves nothing.

- Every balloon and banner is measured for the largest rectangle that fits inside its white area. Under 20% of the bounding box fails. A balloon you cannot fit text into is a broken balloon, so all 28 were checked for the job they actually do.

- Dot fades are measured ring by ring and must fade in the direction their filename claims.

Then nine defects were introduced on purpose, one at a time — a flattened PNG, a blank PNG, a balloon filled solid, a dented sunburst, broken XML, a missing viewBox, a deleted ray, a reversed dot fade, two swapped balloon tails — to confirm each check catches the thing it exists for. Nine out of nine. A test suite that has never failed is not known to work.

WHAT THE TESTING CAUGHT, AND WHAT IT CHANGED

The first full render was wrong, and the second one nearly shipped.

Outlines were originally made by scaling each shape toward its own centre. That sounds fine and is not: proportional scaling moves a nearby edge less than a distant one. Round balloon bodies got a proper thick border while their long thin tails came out as hairlines, and the cog badge's teeth rendered as a broken dashed ring. The fix was to stop scaling and compute a true fixed-distance inward offset along mitred edge normals, so the outline weight is the same distance everywhere on all 74 designs.

Then the balloon tails were still wrong — 0.10 wide over a 0.20 drop, so their two outline edges ran nearly parallel and each tail read as a pinched sliver instead of a pointer. Tails are now wider than they are long.

And the shout balloon's lower spikes were being clipped off the bottom of the canvas, because its radius came from the wider of its two axes. It is elliptical now, and it fits.

RECOLOURING

Two flat colours only: #111111 ink, #FFFFFF fill. Deliberate — two colours are trivial to change and impossible to get wrong.

Illustrator or Affinity: Select > Same > Fill Colour. Figma: edit the two swatches. Photoshop or Procreate on the PNG: Alpha Lock the layer and paint. Canva: upload the SVG and both colours are editable.

WHERE THEY WORK

Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape, Figma, CorelDRAW, Canva, Cricut Design Space, Silhouette Studio and any browser take the SVG. Procreate, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, Keynote and PowerPoint take the transparent PNG.

WHAT IS NOT IN IT

- No EPS, AI or DXF. SVG only, because it is the format I can actually test in every app listed above, and shipping a format I cannot open would be a guess.

- No fonts and no lettering. The balloons and banners ship empty on purpose — you set your own type.

- No raster halftone textures. Those are the Comics Ink & Halftone Pack; the dot fades here are vector, which is a different job.

- No hand-drawn or textured artwork. These are clean geometric shapes, flat and two-colour by design.

LICENCE

Use every file for personal and commercial work: logos, posters, packaging, apparel, stickers, signage, book and album covers, comics, zines, editorial, social, ads, websites, apps, client work, and print-on-demand products you sell. No attribution, no per-project fee, no expiry, no client limit.

You may not resell or redistribute the SVG or PNG files themselves, or a converted copy of them, as design assets. Sell what you make with these, not the files.

No third-party licence is attached to anything in this pack, because nothing in it came from anywhere else. Nothing here can be revoked later.

DELIVERY

Instant .zip download after checkout. 13.7 MB. Nothing is shipped.

If a file will not open in a listed app, contact me and I will fix it or refund you. SVG and PNG are both open universal formats, so this should not happen — but it is on me if it does.