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Old YELLING lettering samples

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At some point in the near future, I'll be tweeting [link] about some of the current problems with the computer lettering used in comics. Apropos of said rant-ish dealie, thought I'd post a random sampling of hand-lettered examples from my older comics work.

Back in the day when comics letterers practiced their skill directly on the art board (as opposed to today, when the lettering is composited separately in production), I had the pleasure of working with some of the best in the business. Here, we see samples from three of 'em.

The two panels in the upper left were lettered by the very cool Bill Oakley for my book Gen13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy issue #1.

Fourth panel down was lettered by the great Tom Orzechowski for the story I did in Joe Madureira's Battle Chasers issue #8 (I think).

Every other example here is from the likewise-great Tomoko Saito* (who learned lettering from Tom, BTW), who still does the retouch and lettering on Dark Horse's adaptation of Hirokaki Samura's manga Blade of the Immortal. The samples are from my minseries Gen13: Grunge: The Movie and Dirty Pair: Start the Violence.

If I Recall Correctly, I scanned these examples out of a few of my comp copies a couple years ago to show a letterer one thing I thought was (and still is) missing in modern computer-font-based lettering: The ability to convey the volume and intensity of yelling (or, YELLING) via the variation of size and line-weight in the lettering. This kinda thing certainly wouldn't be impossible to do with computer fonts, but I'll be dipped if I've ever seen anything along these (hand-lettered) lines done with modern-day lettering... and that's a bit of a shame, really.

You might notice that I often attempt these kinds of lettering tricks in Empowered, which is also hand-lettered (though for reasons more practical than aesthetic**)... but alas, I'm not even remotely in the same league as Bill, Tom or Tomoko when it comes to the arcane (and, increasingly, lost) art of hand lettering.

* Not just a great letterer, but a great artist as well; Empowered readers may recall that she did some yaoi pages for Emp vol. 3, as well as providing some verra helpful ninjutsu translations... and Ninjette's real name, even!

**I hand-letter the book just 'cause it's faster that way, mainly due to the fact that every word balloon I letter on the page means that much less background detail I have to draw. Conventional comics artists have no such luxury, the poor sods.
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bunnychan's avatar
This is a great inside look; I was wondering if your comic text was hand-lettered or not; I think it brings great life to the comics.