Comic Artists Direct

Okay, so you have clean scans of the artwork for your comic pages, to size, at 300 dpi, or bitmaps of black and white scans at 600 dpi, clearly named so you know what's what. You have placed the tif or eps scans into Illustrator and lined them up to center your standard non-bleed comic book size of six by nine inches (or what size your printer tells you). Now what? Now you go back and read part one of this article. Thought you could just skip forward to the interesting stuff, huh?

I have an Illustrator file set up with my own word balloons to pick from. You don't want to use the same one or two balloons throughout or your pages will have a "dead" look. Varying shapes gives the page interest and helps to pull readers' eyes in the right direction (more on that later).

After a conversation I had with Scott Rosema years ago during the first issue of his August comic I will never look at word balloons in the same way. At that time, in the late '90s, comic creators were still so knocked out with what computers could do many ignored lessons of good design from the past. Scott pointed out to me the difference between the standard oval word balloons drawn by many letterers on their computers and the graceful, space saving, rounded-off squares hand drawn by lettering legends in the '70s. He's right - the rounded-off square shapes are simply more attractive. I still use circles for variety, especially on the smallest balloons, but my Illustrator word balloon file contains varying sizes of the rounded-box style.

These rounded-off squares are not easy to draw - not only are the corners rounded, but the outside lines also bulge. "Tails" on word balloons may be easy to draw by joining two curve shapes, but are difficult to give that natural swoop a hand letterer achieves with his brush, and often become too pointy on the ends, turning into lines. You don't want a line. You want a white filled swoop. Don't merge the tails to the balloons on your Illustrator word balloon file because they'll change on the different comic book pages you're lettering. Merge tails to balloons when they're correct on the page. Thought balloons are murder - sure, uniting circles to make them is easy enough, but creating the right feel to them takes some messing around and they're not scalable like word balloons - you want the circle sizes making up thought balloons to be consistent.

So take time with your Illustrator word balloon file. Try to reproduce balloons you like from comics, especially hand-drawn balloons from the '70s and before when artists really knew how to use their tools. Draw different "swoops" for the balloon "tails," especially long ones. Don't settle for the first shapes you make.

Outline your shapes with a one point black line and fill them with white. Remember to turn off the "Scale Line Weight" command in the Scale menu of Illustrator - you want your line thicknesses and type sizes to be consistent. Consistency to ANY graphics project shows professionalism.

Please, please avoid distorting typefaces! When an amateur can't fit type, he reduces the horizontal scale percentage. This is just plain wrong to good design. So how do you fit type in those tight places without changing type size or distorting type? It's called kerning and any professional graphic artist needs to understand it. Kerning is amazingly easy in Illustrator - it's called Tracking and it's in the Character pull down menu. A negative number pulls the type closer together. I wish it was that easy in PageMaker. Just remember, if you're using that word balloon again somewhere else, to return the type to zero tracking - that's why I pull everything off my Illustrator word balloon file.

I copy the appropriate balloon, tail and type from my Illustrator word balloon file and paste them onto the Illustrator file that contains the page I'm lettering. Finally comes the fun part (depending on deadline), typing the script in and arranging the balloons and tails.

When I type in words I think in phrases. Say Twisted is saying, "Finally. I thought they would never notice me. Now, just come over here." I split it "Finally./I thought they/would never/notice me./Now, just come/over here." That split squares up the words nicely for the balloon, but also reads better than, say, putting the "I" up next to "finally" or the "Now" at the end of the previous sentence. It's a phrasing talent I picked up arranging and writing headlines for advertisements and publication headlines.

Pay particular attention to where readers' eyes will go following the panels on a page. It's a letterer's job to lead their eyes from balloon to balloon in the correct order. A good illustrator, like Ed Coutts in "Twisted," will leave empty spaces for balloons that will help lead the letterer, but the final decision is up to you.

After the customer okays the final proofs, I "path" the type in Illustrator, keeping unpathed copies of all for that inevitable, last-minute change. Pathing type converts the typefaces to outlines, preventing output problems. I supply printers with Illustrator TIFs with pathed type and professionally made PDFs.

With experience, lettering can be a fun way to work into comic book production. Although the lowest-paying comic job, with a little practice it can be quick and profitable. Misspellings and mistakes can, however, ruin a comic just as surely as any of the higher-paying positions on a book. Patience, attention to detail and practice are the combination that produces letterers of quality and distinction.

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