This Engine thread on lettering is full of all manner of behind-the-scenes magic from a lot of pros. Some highlights:

Rich Starkings:

There are definitely some stories that benefit from pen lettering, but there are many books I’ve lettered, or fellow Comicraftsmen have lettered, which would have looked much worse if hand lettering were still the norm. ASTRO CITY, GENERATION X, STEAMPUNK, BATTLE CHASERS are all books which allow us a turnaround time of little more than 24 — or perhaps 48 — hours. In the old days, books that ran screamingly late — like the ones I’ve mentioned — would be passed around amongst a handful of letterers or hacked out by someone prepared to sacrifice a night of sleep, and those books suffered accordingly. I created a studio so that I could control the look of each lettered page, and tweak every pae if needed, even if I couldn’t actually letter each page.

I doubt whether Todd Klein would have been able to letter the entire ABC line if he hadn’t switched over to digital lettering. Hand lettering isn’t a lost art — Todd and I still use our hands to letter — but comic book lettering is still evolving and we’re using newer tools in different ways. For those interested, there’s a great roundtable discussion about Abandoned Comic Book Storytelling Techniques on our Balloon Tales website.

One thing that has changed I think, is that writers and artists have more say in the look of the lettering of their books. For the most part, this is a good thing. I remember a certain Warren Ellis would look over lettered proofs of EXCALIBUR and ask me why I was adding Sound Effects to the pages. Well, I wasn’t, the editor was — she thought the pages looked “too quiet.”

Editors at both Marvel and DC used to (and some probably still do) regard the gap between writing and lettering as an opportunity to jump in with their own “improvements” — additions or alterations which wouldn’t become evident to the writer for at least a couple of months. I’ll never forget watching Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano flicking through the pages of one of Morrison’s books at UKCAC one time. “What are you doing?” asked Delano. “Looking for the editor’s changes,” said Morrison. “Yeah, ” grinned Delano, “I do the same thing.”

Stuart Moore:

God, I remember trying to sell DC on digital lettering. It really didn’t happen until after I left. I remember approaching it various ways: “It’ll be a lot easier on a painted book!” That production dept. administration was very, very conservative.

Julie R. had to be convinced, too. Do you remember the “test” you did for her, when you wanted to switch to digital on BOOKS OF MAGIC? You lettered two pages by hand and then the same pages on computer, and we couldn’t tell the difference. Of course, I always suspected you deliberately made the hand-lettering more regular and even than usual…

Shad Petrosky on how the new Top 10 series is being produced:

This is our new process…Zander [Cannon] is scripting and doing layouts/balloon placement, then Todd [Klein] is computer lettering over the layouts, then the lettering, balloons, and borders gets printed out on the board in black for Gene [Ha] to pencil/ink over. Gene draws the trails.

Only the final boards get mailed.

It’s computer lettering but allows for boards with final lettering so that Gene doesn’t draw anything that’s going to get covered up and the final artwork has the lettering on it.

Dave Gibbons on how comic scripts got their format:

If you type the description in upper case, you can just put the caps lock on and bash away, without worrying about the niceties of capitalization at the start of sentences.

Having dialogue in lower case differentiates it from the description, obviously. More importantly, it means that you can use caps for bold and don’t have to bother going back and underlining.

It’s a typewriter thing.

Much, much more in the thread, including links to this roundtable about lettering and the Greg Rucka Livejournal post about the problem with 52 lettering (and before you all throw him under a bus, read Rich Starkings’ response, and then Rucka’s response to that response).

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under Creators, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.