Lettering... LetTeriNg... leTTerinG
Nov 2, 2020 13:12:26 GMT -5
Roquefort Raider, Dizzy D, and 1 more like this
Post by junkmonkey on Nov 2, 2020 13:12:26 GMT -5
I've looked through the forum and can't find a thread devoted to this. (If there is one, please point me at it.)
I thought it might be interesting to have somewhere to post examples of "Wow! What a great piece of lettering!"
When I started making comics one of the things that became very obvious to me, very quickly, was that I knew NOTHING about lettering them. I'd been reading comicsfor years without really looking at how the words got off the page and into my head. Lettering is one of those crafts that the better it's done, the less you notice it. Bad amateur lettering leaps off the page and assults you - shonky, handwritten lettering with spelling mistakes crammed into clumsy balloons shoehorned into odd places. Good professional lettering just flows past the eyes letting you 'hear' the dialogue, leading you seamlessly from panel to panel without you having to puzzle out who saying what - and in what order.
Luckily I found Nate Piekos's invaluable professional comic book lettering tips infographics on Blambot.com
blambot.com/pages/lettering-tips
It's a brilliant wee crash course in American comic book lettering. And I've been slavishly (almost) following his advice ever since.
Though many of the rules he lays out in them make a lot of sense - one of his most emphatic is "Don't Cross Balloon Tails... ever!" and he also is pretty insistent that "Balloon tails should be as economical as possible. Ridiculously long tails should be avoided" - different traditions have different rules. I haven't yet figured out what the hard and fast rules for the French language comics I read are - if there are any - but balloon tails frequently cross snake behind other balloons in them and wander in and out of the furniture in long wiggly swirly embellishment.
Sometimes the artist / letter does something that really breaks the Blambot rules but sells the story so well.
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I thought it might be interesting to have somewhere to post examples of "Wow! What a great piece of lettering!"
When I started making comics one of the things that became very obvious to me, very quickly, was that I knew NOTHING about lettering them. I'd been reading comicsfor years without really looking at how the words got off the page and into my head. Lettering is one of those crafts that the better it's done, the less you notice it. Bad amateur lettering leaps off the page and assults you - shonky, handwritten lettering with spelling mistakes crammed into clumsy balloons shoehorned into odd places. Good professional lettering just flows past the eyes letting you 'hear' the dialogue, leading you seamlessly from panel to panel without you having to puzzle out who saying what - and in what order.
Luckily I found Nate Piekos's invaluable professional comic book lettering tips infographics on Blambot.com
blambot.com/pages/lettering-tips
It's a brilliant wee crash course in American comic book lettering. And I've been slavishly (almost) following his advice ever since.
Though many of the rules he lays out in them make a lot of sense - one of his most emphatic is "Don't Cross Balloon Tails... ever!" and he also is pretty insistent that "Balloon tails should be as economical as possible. Ridiculously long tails should be avoided" - different traditions have different rules. I haven't yet figured out what the hard and fast rules for the French language comics I read are - if there are any - but balloon tails frequently cross snake behind other balloons in them and wander in and out of the furniture in long wiggly swirly embellishment.
Sometimes the artist / letter does something that really breaks the Blambot rules but sells the story so well.
Here's a few examples of the sort of thing I mean:
(From Les adventures de Karen Springwell 1)
I love the way the crazy guy's word balloon gets carried out of the panel with him. His voice is still there shouting his nonsense but it's not cluttering up a small panel.
(From Spirou No 3182 April 1999)
The scientist in the right hand panel is giving a long detailed and boring description of how his Bible-decoding machine works. We don't need to know, but we need to know he knows and is enthusiastic to explain it. So having the 'Uh-huhs' that any sane person would be making under such circumstances plonked over the top of it saves us from having to read the boring explanation (because we can't!).
(From Le maitre du hasard 1 Paris)
I love the slightly ridiculously long tail disappearing through the grill in that centre panel.
From this week's Spirou
These two guys have just spent several panels ranting about Political Correctness gone mad after the woman at the desk was unimpressed by a gag they had drawn. No, she says "It's just the joke is crap."
Their : "Oh yeah, well there's that!", "That too, that's true." in slightly smaller lettering, without a word bubble makes their voices smaller and more humble and (to my mind at least) makes the joke funnier.
