The Section Comics

An experiment in comics

Category: 5-Lettering

  • Lettering tips: General

    I recommend that lettering (and all final production work) will be done digitally, to allow for easy translation and editing.

    Because this sort of project is not working from a full script (due to the amount of time necessary to write a full script), the writer may need to change dialogue to cover something that comes later. It’s important to have that ability.

    Translations

    In addition, if you want to do the story in multiple languages (as we did with the first GNW), it’s better to be able to redraw and modify the balloons and text boxes. Why? Because lettering itself is an art, and there is also an art to translation work in comics. A translator working in comics would generally always prefer to be working off of the unlettered original pages, because then they can translate the intent of a sentence, rather than the words in it, and draw a balloon that fits that text well.

    Within comics, this isn’t always possible, and often they will get the pages with the word balloons already present. This means that the text has to be written to fit the specific size of the balloons. And because the text has to fill out the balloons more or less uniformly, the translator has to carefully work through the text to make it the same size as the existing balloons. This takes considerably more time that re-lettering and creating new balloons would. It also takes a considerably more specific experience than simple translation would. It’s more like trying to dub dialogue over an existing film and match the movement of the speakers mouth than it is like subtitling.

    Hand lettering

    If you want to hand letter, and you have a skilled hand letterer (or letterers) available, then the key to making that work is probably to create a rough guide for the text and placement during the event. This could be done by printing, and drawing text in pencil over the art, or things like that. The more stable the text is at the end of the day, the easier it is for the hand letterer to work. Editing may be more difficult, however, so it is likely that you would want the hand lettering to be done after the end of the event. So, make sure you have the text placements figured out, and a final script typed up by pencils down.

    If you are going to letter or hand letter, I recommend working with the writers and the artists to make sure you can fit what they need in the space available before you start lettering.

    Font size

    As with the page sizing, you will want most of your dialogue and narration text to be the same size (with the exceptions or yells and whispers, which should be larger or smaller to indicate how the person is speaking).

    Unfortunately, font size itself is never going to be a clear standard. Even if we consider the art and resolution to be a standard of say 300dpi at 11×17 inches, I can’t tell you a font of 9pt or 13 pt would be the best choice. The is because fonts themselves vary in size widely. You pretty much have to eyeball it.

    Often the best way to determine the font size to use may sound pretty weird. Scan an existing professionally made comic book page (with text), put it into your lettering software, and add text. Size the font to match the size of that page’s text. That’s the font size you should use for this font in your project.

  • Digital Team

    We totally dropped the ball on having a digital team in the first GNW. Arnoud from Doe Het Niet Zelf and I thought we’d be able to manage the digital production work in addition to organizing and arranging things. This was not the case. I spent a great deal of time walking around and working with artists to help them with comic technique, giving advice, pointing them to the books we’d provided. Arnoud was managing things the entire time, as well, and the amount of work needed for doing the technical portion of the production was much higher than we expected. This was especially true on the last day of the event when everything needed to be scanned, last minute digital work needed to be done, and etc.

    We ended up having to push lettering to post-production, and continually try to work through the page ordering throughout that process.

    So in reality, managing the digital tasks is a job that’s as important as any other, and you will need people to manage it.

    • You will need someone responsible for scanning hand drawn art
    • You will need people capable of doing digital retouching to hand drawn art
    • You will need people capable of digital lettering
    • You will need people capable of using digital publishing software (adobe indesign, affinity publisher, etc.)

    It’s ideally important to have these people involved throughout the process, because this is a lot of work and it’s not a simple matter of finishing this up after the event, because that will probably take some of the creative work out of the hands of the creators and that’s not the intention of this type of project.  

    Everyone is together during the weekend only. It’s important that the writers and artists can connect with the final product. So it’s good to have a clear picture of how everything is fitting together. This will also help writers see gaps that need to be filled. 

    This isn’t to say that everything with regards to production will be possible in the weekend. It’s impossible to know whether that can be done on such an aggressive timeline, but the more stable the product is when pencils go down at the end of the last day, the more the follow-on work which is done after the event becomes practical, rather than creative.

    What if we can’t do the production work during the event

    My recommendation is that you do the following:

    • Work on the page order through out the event, so that it is solid – try and number the pages in a way that will make it clear where they go.
    • Draw clear lettering guides (i.e. sketches of where the word balloons should go on copies or digital versions of the pages).
    • Type up all text clearly

    In the end, what you want is a final product that might not be perfect or finished, but is something you can actually read (with some difficulty), so that it takes away any need for the production staff to do anything other than make your product shine.

  • Lettering tips: Affinity Publisher

    Most people putting together print works these days will use Adobe Indesign, and the rest of the Adobe creative suite – which costs 60-90€ per month. 

    I recently started working with Affinity Publisher, and while your mileage may vary, I have to say it’s a better choice. Purchasing Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo together only runs 165€ total (55€ each), and on the iPad the apps can do everything they can do on the computer, and only run 22€ each (Note: Affinity Publisher is still not yet available for iPad as of this moment).

    But beyond the price, and quality of the products (which I’d say is quite high), the reason this might be the best choice for a 48 hour graphic novel is that if you have all 3 tools, there’s a feature they have called “Studio Link” which allows you to do everything together within Affinity Publisher. Photo retouching, and vector graphics (which is heavily used in digital lettering), and put everything together into a print file. 

    It speeds up my process dramatically, and I love it. Plus, if it does work for you, it costs the same as about 3 months of Adobe (or about 1 month once Publisher is released for iPad).  And everything can be sent to InDesign, if necessary.