Computer Lettering
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 01/17/97
Comics Buyer's Guide
Last week, we talked about the uncommon skill and heroism of the men and women who have diligently lettered this nation's comic books, armed with little more than a few Speedball pens, a bottle of Higgins ink or Black Magic, and some white paint for corrections. This week, we look at the future of lettering, which more and more seems to involve a Macintosh computer, a mouse and Photoshop or some other software.
Computer lettering is the coming thing and we can't stop it. I'm not sure that we want to. Lettering comic books on a Mac or PC has a number of advantages over lettering by hand. Here are ten that occur to me off the top of my scalp…
1. Style. Most letterers-by-hand have one or two styles. With computers, you can select or design the perfect typeface for a given strip. In the near future, I expect we'll see as much variation in lettering as we do in artwork.
2. Consistency. Once you've selected the perfect lettering style for a strip, you can change letterers without changing that look. In fact, if deadlines are tight, you can distribute your twenty-five pages amongst twenty-five letterers and, as long as they all have the same font on their computers, it all hangs together.
3. Expediency. Traditionally, the letterer has to finish a page before the inker can start working on it. (Hand lettering can be done after, usually via paste-ons, but it's time-consuming and messy, and creates production problems.) But computer lettering is usually done separate from the inking. The page is finished and scanned and then the lettering is added to the image in the computer, but not on the page. This means that the art can be finished without waiting for some letterer to complete his or her end of things.
4. Convenience for the artist. This goes with #3. Since the art can easily be finished without waiting for a letterer, that means that an artist who pencils and inks his own work can just sit down and do so at his own pace. He doesn't have to pencil the whole thing, then wait two weeks for the letterer to finish and return it to him for inking. This can be enormously beneficial to some artists. The late Doug Wildey, for example, felt he did vastly better work when he could pencil and ink the art as one task.
5. Translation. When pages are reprinted overseas, someone has to go through and redo all the balloons, which can mean extensive art retouching and loads of cut-and-pasting. But computer lettering is usually kept separate from the artwork. It's much simpler to, via computer, lay in the French or Spanish (or whatever) dialogue on pages without the English balloons.
6. Cleanliness. When art is being shipped off to a traditional "hand" letterer, it usually works like this: The page is drawn out in pencil, it goes to the letterer who letters in the copy, then it goes to whoever's going to ink the story. Even the best letterer disrupts the pencil art a bit as he handles it, rules his guide lines, roughs in his lettering, etc. I've worked with inkers who are forever complaining that the letterer had smudged the pencil art and/or gotten oil (from his fingers) all over the art. In fact, one of the best inkers I ever hired used to insist he would not work on pages that had been to a certain letterer who apparently had uncommonly-oily skin. "I can't use my favorite brush once he's handled the art," the inker told me. Again, with computer lettering, this is not a problem.
7. Paper Preference. Most comic book companies furnish illustration board to their artists, usually pre-printed with the margins in non-repro blue. This is not a matter of the company being generous — it's to ward off arguments. You see, some paper that is great for penciling is bad for inking and vice-versa. Jack Kirby, for instance, disliked the paper that DC and Marvel furnished, but every time Jack bought his own paper, the inkers complained it didn't take ink well. Letterers frequently have the problem that the chosen paper stock may not be friendly to the specific tools they use. But since computer lettering is not on the actual art board, no one has to worry about their needs. The drawing surface can be selected wholly with regard to what's best for the artist(s).
8. Control. Most artists are not good at lettering. In fact, some of the best comic artists in history have been lousy letterers, and deface their own pages when they make the attempt. Instead of shipping it all off to a stranger, many of them are now able to do computer lettering in their own studios or to have it done under their supervision.
9. More Control. It's much simpler to do lettering corrections, and especially to move the balloons. An editor or artist can look at a page and say, "Move all the balloons down an eighth of an inch." On a hand-lettered page, that change could take someone an hour of cut-and-pasting, and tampering with the artwork. On the computer, it takes around six seconds and the art is undisturbed.
10. Versatility and Special Effects. This is primarily of note on the big display lettering used for logotypes and story titles. In the past, many letterers weren't all that creative with such elements, nor could they have been expected to be, given what they were paid, and how little time they were given to do their jobs. Most developed "stock" lettering styles for story titles — something they could quickly inscribe — and that was what we got. But with computer lettering, a whole world of type fonts is easily at the letterer's disposal; he or she can have a thousand fonts nestled away on the hard disk. These fonts can quickly be imported, tweaked, altered, configured, slanted or otherwise tailored to the particular needs of a page, and even aligned to the perspective of an individual panel.
And there are probably a few other reasons. So, with all these advantages, was I all excited and thrilled at the prospect of seeing comic books lettered by computer? No, I was not.
I think lettering is an art form, particularly as practiced by the best letterers, some of whom I mentioned last week. There is something creative in what these folks have done…something that I could not believe could ever be totally matched by even the most creative hacker.
Ten years ago, if you had told me that computer lettering would become commonplace in comics, I'd have started painting protest signs (by hand!) and vowing to war against that abomination. The purist in me would have said that comic books oughta be lettered with Speedball pens and Higgins ink. (I also felt negative about inking with markers.) At the time, my reference for non-organic lettering was the LeRoy lettering done on the Wonder Woman comics of the forties and the EC comics edited by Al Feldstein in the fifties.
The LeRoy lettering device was invented for jobs like architectural renderings — places where you want uniformity and precision, not personality. It consists of a stylus and a pantographic lettering form; no matter who uses it, the lettering comes out essentially the same. A gent named Jim Wroten did it, with his spouse assisting, for all those EC and Wonder Woman comics — and while the Wrotens probably did it as well as it could be done, the result still struck me as sterile and intrusive.
Plus, the artists, most of whom weren't great letterers, had to draw the word balloons and sometimes sketch in the story title and the occasional sound effect. (Years ago, a critic in an EC 'zine penned a lengthy treatise of how Feldstein usually eschewed the use of the "crutch" devices like sound effects. The gent missed the obvious point that the editor-writer may have been discouraged from putting in sound effects because those pages often did not pass through the hands of anyone who could letter decently.)
Harvey Kurtzman, the other main EC editor, didn't like the looks of LeRoy at all. He brought in Ben Oda to hand-letter his books — probably a wise move. I can't imagine those wonderful, Kurtzman issues of MAD with the antiseptic LeRoy lettering. (And neither could the readers. When Feldstein edited a MAD imitation called Panic, he had the same artists working in the same style, but with the Wrotens doing the balloons. It looked all wrong and he eventually switched over to Oda. Feldstein eventually employed Oda — or sometimes Wally Wood — to letter the story titles in his other books.)
A few years ago, when I first heard rumblings that some might try lettering comics with a computer, I thought of LeRoy lettering and winced. I also thought about a few attempts by Charlton Comics to save bucks and/or time — most likely, the former — by jury-rigging some sort of typewriter to output an all-caps display font. (Anyone recall those Charltons that featured a lettering credit for someone named "A. Machine?")
Letter comic books on computers? No way, I thought, can they make that work.
But two things have budged me off that position. One is my increasing belief that artists need to be free to create their work the way they want, without anyone at any office telling them what size to draw, what paper to use, what tools to use, or how to divide up the workload with their collaborators. If I believe that, I have to believe they should be able to use computers if that's their choice. And the second thing that changed my mind was Richard Starkings.
Richard was a letterer of the traditional pen-and-ink school — he lettered The Killing Joke, among many other gigs — and a good one. I don't know if he was getting a vision of the future or if he was getting carpal tunnel syndrome or both…but he worked out the logistics of lettering on the Mac and the end-result is leagues better than I would have dreamed possible. His Comicraft company letters dozens of comics per month, and does so with an incredible artistry and efficiency.
His fonts are brilliantly designed, and he has a number of them — a font with a slight hint of "high tech," a font with a bit more "cartooniness," and so on. He has sometimes designed a new typeface — no small task — specifically for a new project. This makes it possible to "cast" the lettering for a comic book, selecting just the proper style to compliment the artwork.
(Comicraft sells many of their fonts, by the way, in both PC and Mac format. There's probably an ad elsewhere in this publication. I'm going to get around to ordering 'em all one of these days for my PC; if you're doing comics and can't letter, so should you.)
Others — such as Todd Klein and John Costanza — have also reminded me that, with a creative soul in charge, typography is just as valid an art as calligraphy. The bad computer lettering I've seen — and there's a lot of it out there, mostly on independents — is not a failure of technology but of the person at the keyboard. Actually, my biggest problem with computer lettering is not the lettering but with the balloons, which are often a bit too precise and elliptical to feel like one with the artwork. I'll bet this is solved before long.
Perhaps, if there were a dozen Artie Simeks plying their trade in comics today, I might feel otherwise. There is a certain "organic" feel to the best hand-lettering — an unobtrusive quality that works with, not against the illustration. But again, when computer lettering feels that way, it just means that somebody doesn't know how to do it well.
At last year's San Diego Con, Todd Klein — one of the best letterers this business has ever seen — was showing around a page and challenging folks to identify which balloons were done by hand and which, on his computer. I picked them out, but I sure had to look closely. For all practical purpose, he had done exactly the same thing he did with a pen, only he did it on a Mac. Others have not tried as slavishly to re-create hand lettering, but the results do not offend my purist genes as I would have expected.
Ultimately, I have to concede that what you gain with computer lettering may more than compensate for what you lose. At least, I wouldn't quarrel with any creator who felt that way. I've even steered a few things to Comicraft and was very happy with the results.
If you follow this column, you're going to get sick of seeing me say this: There are many ways of creating a comic book. Carl Barks did not work in the same manner (or even with the same tools) as Jack Kirby, and Will Eisner does not work the same way as either of them. Even the two main EC editors, Feldstein and Kurtzman, had totally different working methods — from each other and from Stan Lee and Julius Schwartz and Chase Craig…
Over the years, the "assembly line" mentality of the major publishers has tended to force artists and writers of varied talents into rigid job descriptions. When a new guy takes over Spider-Man, they expect him to work just like the guy before him. This was always a problem, but it's going to get worse as technology expands the options for writers and artists. There will be more ways in which they can collaborate, more ways in which they can create their work. For example, some artists are even experimenting with drawing completely on computer, no inking necessary.
Computer lettering and coloring are only the beginning. It can all make for an exciting creative revolution, just so long as we all remember two things. One is that there is no one right method to create a comic book —
— and the other is that some things will always be better done by hand. All of these computer advances just give us more ways to create. I just hope no one way ever becomes the only way.