A semi-scary thing happened to me the other night: I discovered I couldn't do something I used to be able to do. Allow me to explain…
I used to draw a lot and letter a lot. I never had any delusions or even desires that I might make either my primary line of work…but when writing and editing comic books, for instance, it sometimes came in handy to be able to do a little art touch-up or letter a balloon. I've drawn, or sometimes laid-out, a number of covers and even a few stories, and I would often design the cover lettering on comics I was editing. Sometimes, when an artist had fallen behind, I'd ink some backgrounds. I had enough control of a pen, brush or pencil to be able to do that. In fact, Tom Orzechowski — who some folks felt was the best letterer in comics when he was doing more of it — once said in an interview that I was a better letterer than half the guys doing it full-time. Beyond all this, I used to simply enjoy spending an hour or two a week at the drawing board instead of the keyboard.
But I got away from it — or perhaps it got away from me — for several reasons. One, of course, was the computer. Back when I was doing comics in the eighties, I designed and lettered the logo for a book I did called Crossfire and it took me about eight hours over three days to get it where I wanted it. The Crossfire logo we use now is a version I did recently on the computer. It took about seven minutes.
So there's one good reason I'm not doing as much lettering as I once did. Another is that I'm not editing a whole line of comics at the moment. Yet another is this: I've been honored to work with some of the best comic artists of the present-day…folks who are not only much, much better than me but much, much better than most professional artists. Working with those guys only made me see my work as even less adequate than it already was…and one day, one of them made a rather thoughtless remark that I think helped erect a little mental block on the topic. He didn't mean it maliciously…probably wouldn't even remember that he said it.
Last evening, I was called upon to do some fancy calligraphy. It was the first time I'd really lettered something by hand in years and I was appalled at how poor my work was. Way below whatever my previous standard was. It's jarring to discover you can't do something as well as you could five or ten years ago. I wasn't so good five or ten years ago that I could afford to lose any of it…but I have.
I have resolved to practice and to get back whatever I once had. But I thought it was worth mentioning it here as a kind of cautionary note: Use it or lose it, people. Computers are great but you might not want to wake up one morn and discover that you've lost some organic, personal skill just because you found a good software program to do the same thing. This is what killed the dinosaurs, right?