A Little Bit About Lettering (From My Limited Perspective) (Patreon)

Recently I've had enough folks here ask me about my lettering (such as it is), that I thought I'd put up some posts about...well, my lettering. As well as logos and story title and SFX lettering and all that. This will involve some design work, which I'm not known for, mainly because it's not one of my strong suits, and like lettering, it's something that grew out of necessity. I don't refer myself as a letterer or as a designer, but when you're a cartoonist, a lot falls under that heading. So you try to do the best you can in those regards. If all else fails, pay someone else to help, when and if you can. That works, too. 

I think my lettering and design sense is somewhat effective and at the very least does the trick when it comes to the specifications it has to meet. My lettering need to be legible so my comics can be read without hitches on the part of the reader, and the lettering should be effective in conveying emotion, mood and intensity. I know nothing about graphic design but if I have to do a logo for something I attack it like a drawing and just try to make it attractive and hope it conveys the spirit of the project it's intended for. The place where I tended to do a lot of this work was within the Fun Strip format, the page toppers are mostly hand drawn logos and I liked to play around with fonts and text and design elements in the individual Fun Strip title panels. I wanted to add an extra element to the gag material and break up the monotony of title-set up-payoff with some added visual flourish. And sometimes the title panel could contain an extra joke or embellishment adding to the overall presentation. I really enjoyed doing those, and still do, when I get the chance. I treated every title panel as a sort of comic book splash page title in miniature.

My lettering ability is self-taught and is often a source of frustration for me, I've always been open about that. Lettering is the most difficult aspect of many of my pages, as well as many commissions. My OCD kicks in very hard when I letter something, and because I'm not technically proficient with the tools and techniques, I basically fumble my way to the finish line (and then back up and rerun parts of the race again, which is why if you hold my originals up to the light you can see a lot of dark splotches in the text areas owing to white correction ink and multiple revisions. It's only become harder as I've gotten older, with my drawing hand and arm in pretty poor physical shape, and my eyes not being as good as they used to be. At some point I can see myself having to give up being stubborn and get a font made of my lettering, and learn to do these things digitally. For the time being, I'm still stubborn and like to try to have everything done by hand on the physical page. I know some cartoonists do apply logos and lettering to commissions by printing them on the board, but, whether I'm printing out a logo to trace and ink or free-styling it, I'm still drawing everything by hand. 

Lettering is by far the number one thing that damages my hand, so it's something I have to deal with at some point. One thing that doesn't help is that I tend to write a lot, just like I talk, and just like I type. And writing a lot for the page means lettering a lot on the page. At 57 years old, you'd think I'd have figured this out by now. (This has been a public service announcement from The House of Fun: watch your wrist, hand and arm, friends).

Despite my not knowing what I'm doing, I've been lettering comics since I was little. Like most kids who drew their own comics, I wrote, illustrated and lettered my own terrible Marvel, Lord of The Rings and Captain Klutz fan fiction. Kids are pretty much auteurs and DIY artists, even the ones that aren't hiding from the world at large in their bedrooms. You did everything. Lettering wasn't something I ever gave any thought to other than you needed it. It was a means to an end, comic book pages had lettering, and I was making comic book pages. If I didn't scrawl “It's Clobberin' Time” in a shaky balloon above a badly-drawn Ben Grimm's cranium in panel three, well, then he wouldn't be able to say “It's Clobberin' Time!” in my stupid comic. What kind of Fantastic Four comic would that be? It looked like hell, just like the rest of that comic (boy, do I wish I still had it!), but it wasn't a deal breaker for my hoped-for career in comics. Obviously, when and if I ever became a professional comic book penciler, someone else would handle the lettering stuff. They had people for that. Maybe Artie Simek or Joe Rosen, even!

As you probably know, I eventually did manage to start making comics that people spent money on (I even got to write stuff for Ben Grimm to say, once or twice!). I didn't letter the first small press comic work I penciled, which was Phigments #1 (1987, Amazing Comics). According to the Grand Comics Database the first issue was lettered by none other than Pat Brosseau (as well as someone listed as "Lopez", who I'm unfamiliar with). I did not remember that at all, and as it turns out Pat has become an established pro letterer who has tons of credits, one of which is lettering the four-issue Mask series I wrote for Dark Horse in 1995 (The Hunt For Green October). We all start somewhere, and hopefully go somewhere, if things work out all right (and hopefully that somewhere isn't Staten Island, but, oh, well. Bring on The Purge!). Anyway, it was pretty wild to be reminded that my first comic was lettered by Pat Brosseau. Obviously neither of us are putting that in the bio of our Twitter feed.

According to the GCD the letterer on the second issue of Phigments was Mike Fisher, and if this person quit working in comics because of Phigments, or Amazing Comics, I would completely understand.

(As an aside, I have stories about the mess that was Phigments. Remind me and I'll post about my first published comics work, a heady but miserable two-issue headache. Here's a teaser: Our family dog peed on the cover to Phigments #1 after I had finished drawing it. My first professional comic book inking job and my first review! )

After Phigments disintegrated in amazing fashion, I managed to get Pirate Corp$! Launched at Eternity Comics courtesy of Brian David-Marshall and Tony Ng (who I am still friends with to this day). Kurt Hathaway was hired to letter the series. When the series was canceled at Eternity, and picked up by SLG, Kurt stayed on as letterer. I was paying him out of my pocket, and he was kind enough to give me a break on the page rate. But eventually it became an expense I couldn't handle, and I took over the lettering out of necessity. And those early issues are not attractive. I lettered in lower-case for quite a while, for reasons I can't even begin to recall. Eventually my lettering got neater, and after a good number of pages the lettering got better. By this point I was lettering my joke stuff like Milk & Cheese and with that material I wasn't as uptight about how things looked. Early Milk & Cheese comics were all about being purposely crude, in the art and the jokes, which eventually gave way to a more organized chaos as I grew more anxious about how my work looked and what people might think of my art. Which is a whole kettle of life ruination and therapy, which crops up often enough here, so let's leave off on that old topic (for now, at least).

If my lettering never became anywhere near “professional quality” – meaning super clean and slick like standard Marvel, DC and your average King Feature's Syndicate genre strip – it  rose to a point where it worked with the page rather than against it. My pages, even the cluttered ones, became more curated and designed and the lettering was legible. My sound effects lettering got expressive and solid. My logos and titles can be fairly attractive and punchy, despite being hard fought battles. I approach lettering and logos like drawings, I just work on them and revise and stumble and fall and get back up until something is finished. Considering I have no background in this other than osmosis, reference and enthusiasm, I have achieved some decent results. My pages certainly got better, overall, and a lot of that is due to my cleaning up my lettering as an attempt to overhaul and organize my linework and lettering. My pages stayed cluttered (Eltingville Club #1 and 2, anyone? Hello and kill me, please), but better control of the elements helped keep things (mostly) clear to the eye.

Does lettering always have to be clean? Hell, no. Fuck, no. That's an aesthetic (and possibly even emotionally-driven) hurdle to get over, especially if you're doing your own comics and feeling intimidated by the standard mainstream and newspaper style of lettering being “correct”. So many of us grew up on Artie Simek and Gaspar Saladino and Ben Oda – and I love that crisp, clean, gorgeous stuff. But look at the lettering on so many small press or art comics, on newspaper strips like Cul de Sac or Mutts or even Calvin and Hobbes or what have you – and these days, look at so many web comics. They can vary wildly in design, style and neatness. What matters is that the lettering pairs with the artwork, and is legible. That it does the job of communicating the words being spoken or the text in the captions.

Simply put, lettering is art. It is a part of the comic page. Everything that goes onto a comic page is comic art. Drawing, lettering, colors. And you want them to complement one another to complete the page in order to get the particular effects you want. Balloons and sound effects should lead the eye correctly and not confuse or obstruct the proceedings in such a way that the reader is thrown out of the reading experience. If the lettering gets a little sloppy, sometimes that works. If it's organic and looks attractive and doesn't interrupt the flow of messaging, then it's fine.

I grew to accept my lettering, because it's my lettering. It's penciled and inked like the figures and backgrounds, it's part of a whole. And it has a definite effect on the work. Many years ago the comics creator Paul Guinan gave me a compliment about my lettering, saying something to the effect that he couldn't believe how loud my characters could get, that the intensity came across as something the reader can almost hear out loud. That always stuck with me, and it made me feel better about my lettering work. Sure, my lettering was technically all over the place, but it communicated and “worked”. It did the job and fit the bill. It went with the art.

While I still look at my lettering and wish it was “better” in many ways (cleaner, surer, more uniform, more evenly spaced with a more constant height), when I look at a comic I drew that was lettered by someone else, it just looks wrong to me. And maybe to many of my readers. My lettering is part of my style. Even if the best letterer in the business works over my pages, it just isn't my style. It's like the characters have been dubbed. And it doesn't jibe. It still kills me that I ran out of time and wasn't able to letter the Glavin story for the Simpson's Treehouse of Terror (in particular among other Bongo work). The lettering was fine, it was the Bongo house style and I was very used to how it looked. It was right for the comic. But it wasn't “me”. Those pages are out of synch and slightly alien, they weren't expressive and “loud” enough where it needed to be. A sort of straitjacket was thrown around the art.

And that's the thing. You want your art to not be held back or held down. However well or technically adept your work may or may not be, you want everything to be working on all cylinders, what best reflects and complements the artwork and writing. A lot of lovely comics art has been hampered by stuff lettering, especially when folks use generic computer fonts and balloons. It kills me to see people still throwing templates and dead text onto their work. I understand the necessity there, from my own experience, but there are more choices and opportunities to go beyond that cheap, convenient slap-it-down approach.

I'm not the person to instruct anyone on lettering past discussing my own work, and an overall pep talk about not settling for terrible and/or lifeless lettering for your comics. If you haven't seen it, Nate Piekos (who has been the letterer on Beasts of Burden for some years now) has put together the most complete and instructive book on the subject with The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering. It's worth getting and looking at, no matter what style of art or lettering you're pursuing with your own work. These are truths and fundamentals about balloon placement, eye flow, clarity, and the technical and fundamental aspects for hand-lettering and (mostly) digital lettering.

You can read more about Nate's book and get a signed copy here (and tell him I sent you, I don't get anything but want to support Nate, a great guy, letterer and a proud member of Team Beasts of Burden whose work I greatly appreciate): https://blambot.com/pages/the-essential-guide-to-comic-book-lettering

Okay. Next time I post about lettering, we'll have some actual lettering stuff. I probably can't explain my process all that well, but I can show it off and let you look at it and tell you what I was trying to do. So, that's what we'll be doing with these posts. I'll dig out examples of lettering done on the page, off the page (to be dropped in digitally, like the Biff Bam Pow example above) and show process on logos and things like that (when and if available).

Hope this will be of some interest.