Images © Charlton Comics or the respective copyright holders.

Yesterday I wrote about the Famous Artists lesson on lettering and showed this mini-comic cover, mentioning it contained the only information I could find on comics lettering when I was trying to get into the business in the mid 70s. I got it then, and I believe I still have it somewhere, but haven’t seen my copy in many years. Several readers sent me the entire booklet in PDF form, so I thought I’d write about what it contains on comics lettering, a mere four pages out of 36, but it was enlightening to me then, and is still somewhat useful now for anyone interested in hand-lettering.

I’m putting the first and last of the four pages together because they contain continuous text, with the pages between having drawn instructions and samples. So, let’s look at what’s written here. Everything is short and to the point.

A. TOOLS: Speedball B-6 is what many letterers were using when I started at DC, but for regular balloon lettering they usually filed down the sides of the point to make a thinner line, a tricky job that I never really mastered. I did nearly all my balloon lettering with technical drawing pens instead for my first few years. When I tried dip pens again, I used a C-6 wedge-tipped point instead of the rounded B-6. Also note that the name of the plastic lettering guide is misspelled, it’s “Ames.” Most of this is covered better in the drawing below.

B. YOU BEGIN TO LETTER: The one thing I highly disagree with here is the last sentence, “Some letterers prefer to underline emphasized words.” Maybe someone at Charlton did that, though I don’t recall seeing it, but at DC and Marvel, no one did that. I tried it occasionally when the script called for a hand-written note, and was once reprimanded by Julie Schwartz for it. “Nothing in comics is underlined!” he told me. (I still do it for hand-written notes…)

D. BALLOONS: The description and differences between Dialogue and Thought balloon shapes point out one of the problems with the older style of dialogue balloons, which where shaped with large, wide scallops (see the examples below). When you do that, there’s less to set them apart from thought balloons which also have scallops, though smaller and more of them. Of course these days thought balloons are rare, so it’s not much of an issue, but the movement to mostly oval and round speech balloons can be seen as a way to keep them separate from thought balloons visually.

E. PANELS: I kind of miss inking panel borders, one of the letterer’s jobs for the vast majority of comics art when I started, and until computer lettering took over. A few artists insisted on inking their own borders, but most were happy to have the letterer do it. Now it’s often the inker’s job, and the inker also has to completely ink all the art even where the lettering will cover it, where with hand-lettering part of each panel was already accounted for. No wonder inkers hate computer lettering!

G. SWIPES: I never really had this, just a large comics collection. When I was on staff at DC, of course, the world’s greatest swipe file was right in the Production Room, rows of file cabinets with all kinds of reference: logos, panels clipped from old comics art, cover photostats, piles of original cover lettering by Gaspar Saladino and others. And mine, too, after I was there a while.

Here’s the first of two hand-lettered pages by Frank Bravo, dated 1973. I don’t know the name, but Charlton didn’t always give lettering credits, so that’s not surprising. As a letterer he wasn’t really that good. His basic alphabets are okay, but some of the other work on the open title here and the display lettering on the next page is barely of professional quality. Perhaps he was a staffer who pitched in on lettering when needed. And remember, Charlton was kind of the low end of the comics business, pay wise, so perhaps their standards were lower. I know on some Charlton books they did lettering with a kind of giant typewriter (credited as A. Machine), and some of their artists like Joe Staton and Jim Aparo did their own lettering. That aside, all the advice and examples given above are perfectly fine for a beginner, and the information about the Ames Lettering Guide (spelled right here) is what put me in the know on that subject, and very similar to MY OWN instructions for new letterers. I never used the angled edge of the guide for italic guidelines, though, I just winged it, as did other letterers I learned from.

Here’s where Frank Bravo goes off the rails a bit, some of this is pretty dubious, though it does get the idea across. But, looking at these examples when I was trying to letter samples to show to the comics companies, I was already thinking, “I can do better than that!” I might have been wrong then, but once I got rolling it was true, at least. And remember, this booklet was all the help available to someone outside the business at the time, so really, I owe a lot to Charlton for it! They used to give these away with a subscription to any of their titles, and I bet they got a lot of subscriptions that way.

Images © Famous Artists Cartoon Course, Inc. except as noted.

Someone on the Digital Webbing lettering forum recently posted a link to a PDF of interest to anyone who is a student of comics lettering, as I am. The Famous Artists School was begun in the 1940s by commercial illustrator Albert Dorne. If you’re a long-time comics reader you probably remember their ads in the comics, like this one:

Now, I have to admit that, while I did like to draw, when I was young it never occurred to me to send in for information about this mail-order art course. I can’t say why, maybe I just felt I was better off doing my own thing, but if I had subscribed to their Cartooning course, I’m sure I would have learned a lot from it, and maybe even become a comics artist. Possibly.

If I had persevered through the course to lesson 18, it would have taught me a lot about lettering for comics, too, and information about that was hard to come by when I was trying to get into comics in the mid 1970s. I did find and buy a small mini-comic how-to that included lettering published by Charlton Comics:

Image © Charlton Comics or the respective copyright holder.

It was written by Nicola Cuti, and had lettering tips and demos by Frank Bravo, and was quite helpful. Wish I knew where my copy went, I haven’t seen it in years. That was about all the information available in print at that point, as far as I knew, and I had to wait until I got on staff at DC Comics in their Production Department to learn more.

Back to the FACC lesson, it doesn’t say who wrote this Lettering how-to, but a number of popular comic strip artists were on the staff list—Rube Goldberg, Milton Caniff and Al Capp are still well-known names—and examples of their work and others are included. The perspective is very much geared toward newspaper strip artists, as you might expect.

Page two of the lesson shows pictures of a number of different dip pen points and lettering that could be made with them, a great idea! Now, when I started I was using Speedball dip pens, but mostly for larger lettering. For balloon lettering I followed the example of my first lettering teacher John Workman and used technical drawing pens. I don’t know if they were on the market when this lesson was written in the mid 1950s, but if so, they weren’t yet considered a lettering tool by the writer.

The course begins with a fine introduction outlining the importance of lettering as part of telling a story in cartooning. It also divides lettering into two main categories: balloon lettering and display lettering, with the latter being anything other than regular dialogue balloons and captions. I concur! But here’s something else in the text that I find interesting:

“It’s true that most successful comic strip men have an assistant to do their lettering. But, it is also true that each and every one of the men at the top is perfectly able to do his own lettering. The assistant merely saves him valuable time. If you are lucky enough to get a crack at being an established cartoonist’s assistant, you must be able to letter as well as the boss, preferably better.”

Now, there’s a window into an inviting world! And probably one that’s mostly passed us by now, but in the 1970s, if I’d read that, I’d have been itching to try to get into it! Ah, the days when comic strips paid really well, and each strip had it’s own staff of assistants…the few strip artists I know do it all themselves, and either letter it on a computer or have someone do that part for them.

As the course gets down to the practicalities of balloon lettering, they again show some dip pen points. I’ve used Speedball B-series points for larger balloon and display lettering, the others I don’t think I’ve used. Some I haven’t seen. For drawing guidelines they show a simple method of using a marked-out paper guide, as well as the plastic Ames Lettering Guide at lower right, though used incorrectly! I did a one-sheet lettering guide myself many years ago that has the correct position, you can find it HERE. I’m guessing the artist had never used it himself.

This practice stroke and letter shape guide is on firm ground, though the letterforms are not really what most cartoonists followed, rather they’re idealized type-like forms. Still, it’s not a bad starting point. And the examples below that of Bad Lettering are entertaining!

Here’s another amusing group of bad lettering samples. In general, the how-to’s in this lesson are fine, though.

Finally we get to putting lettering into balloon shapes. Whoever did these samples has a style with some nice bounce that would look fine on a humorous comic strip. Interesting that he chose a spelling of the word practice (practise) that is much more common in England than here. Also, he did not follow the advice for the letter I with crossbars from the previous diagram of Good and Bad Lettering, where it says, “Generally, most cartoonists put serifs on the letter “I” when it is a personal pronoun and omit them when it is a part of a word.” Something I’ve been saying for many years, and nice to see it reinforced here.

In all, this course is well done, and could have gotten anyone on the right track with hand-lettering. The Cartoon course was discontinued in the 1980s, perhaps due to the shrinking market for comics and comic strip artists, but not before serving some artists like Bernie Wrightson well — he cites it as a major learning tool. Just as well, they didn’t have to even consider computer lettering…! I believe the Famous Artists School still offers courses on drawing and painting, though. You can visit their WEBSITE for more information.

Images and script © Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill.

Above is a photo of the script for the second 80-page issue of THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: CENTURY, this one dated 1969. It’s due out later this year, probably not until summer at latest report, but I’ve finished the first round of lettering, have sent color proofs to everyone, and am waiting for any further corrections or rewrites. Actually, this is not even the whole script, as it doesn’t include the six text pages at the end, but you get the idea. A lot to read and consider for artist Kevin O’Neill, colorist Ben Dimagmaliw and myself. Fortunately, it goes to Kevin first, and he does complete art on the pages before I get them for lettering, so I don’t have to study the entire script in detail, but can concentrate mainly on the dialogue and captions.

Alan doesn’t usually include many notes on lettering. In fact, Kevin is the one who decides where things should be in upper and lower case, as seen above.

Kevin sends me lettering placements as well, and I work closely with him, sending batches of lettered page proofs in black and white as I finish them, which Kevin goes over and gives me any corrections or changes he wants. We also work closely on the design of the covers and inside text pages.

Mostly, Alan gives us everything he can think of that might be relevant in the script, then lets us get on with doing the rest of it. So, when Alan does include lettering notes, I try extra hard to come up with something I think he’ll like. There are a couple of examples in this issue.

Without giving too much away, and I think one has to almost expect it, there’s a psychedelic drug trip in the story, one undertaken by Mina Murray. As it first appears in the script, Alan writes:

NOW WE HAVE A SHOT THROUGH MINA’S EYES AS SHE STARTS TO MILDLY EXPERIENCE THE FIRST EFFECTS OF THE DRUG SHE HAS TAKEN. WE CANNOT SEE MINA HERSELF HERE, BUT LOOMING IN FROM OUR LEFT OF THE FOREGROUND IN A SORT OF SWOLLEN FISH-EYE DISTORTION EFFECT, WE HAVE ORLANDO, HEAD AND SHOULDERS, HIS DISTORTED FACE LOOKING SORT OF CONCERNED HERE AS HE LEANS IN CLOSE TO PEER AT MINA. FROM THE NEAR RIGHT BACKGROUND, EQUALLY DISTORTED IN THE FISH-EYE LENS OF MINA’S VISION, ALLAN ALSO LEANS FORWARD, BEING ABOUT HALF TO THREE QUARTER FIGURE HERE. HE ALSO LOOKS A BIT CONCERNED ABOUT HOW ODDLY MINA IS BEHAVING.

Okay, nothing about the lettering there, but the dialogue has a repeated word effect, and in a side note, Kevin writes: “This is deliberate spelling, see page 47 for LSD effect.”

Not too hard to figure out what’s needed, a tripping effect that’s gradually developing. On this panel I made the repeated words in a variety of colors, and begin to introduce a rainbow gradient into the balloon colors.

On the next page we have another panel seen from Mina’s viewpoint, and as Alan writes:

BECAUSE MINA’S HALLUCINATIONS ARE GETTING STRONGER, MAYBE YOU COULD MAKE THE TWO HIPPIES LEANING IN TOWARDS MINA…IN INCREASINGLY PSYCHEDELIC AND DREAM-LIKE COLOURS.

Of course the colors are by Ben Dimagmaliw, following notes from Kevin, and I don’t see them when I’m doing the lettering, but I could imagine the effect this panel shows.

Here’s what I came up with, the lettering is now in full-blown rainbow gradient, with a lighter and more pastel gradient inside the balloons, and the borders in solid magenta. I also used Adobe Illustrator’s Envelope Distort feature to give the lettering some wavy distortion, and the balloons are amorphously shaped as well.

The setting for Mina’s trip is a rock concert in Hyde Park, London, and one of the focal points is the band’s lead singer. Alan had some specific suggestions for me about his dialogue balloons:

NOW, AS TO HOW WE HANDLE TERNER’S AMPLIFIED BALLOONS HERE, I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE. WE COULD JUST HAVE ALL OF THEM IN A CRACKLE-EDGED BALLOON, BUT  SINCE I WANT THE SONG TERNER IS SINGING TO BE KIND OF PLAYING IN VOICEOVER DURING OUR CUTAWAY SCENES, A STRAIGHTFORWARD CRACKLE EDGE MIGHT BE TOO SPIKY AND OBTRUSIVE. IS THERE ANY OTHER SORT OF BALLOON EDGE THAT YOU CAN COME UP WITH, TODD, THAT SORT OF CONVEYS ELECTRICAL AMPLIFICATION WITHOUT THE SPIKES? HOW ABOUT SOME SORT OF WOBBLY, WAVERY EDGE TO SUGGEST THE DISTORTION OF AMPLIFIED VOICES OVER A TANNOY OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT? ANYWAY, I’LL LEAVE IT IN YOUR HANDS.

I felt I understood what Alan was after, and here’s what I came up with:

I don’t know how well the details of the balloon edges will show when printed, but there are actually three layers to them. The balloons are filled with 75% yellow, to suggest electrical amplification, and have a dark orange border. I used Illustrator’s Roughen filter to give them a randomly wobbly edge. Then, for each balloon oval I made a copy, pasted it in front, removed the fill color (leaving only the outline), reduced the outline width and flipped it left to right, then made the color a lighter orange. Next I copied THAT balloon shape again, pasted it in front once more, and flipped it vertically, top to bottom, then made the color of this third layer an even lighter orange. The resulting balloon borders have what I hope is a randomly energetic and electrical look without the spiky edges I’d usually use, as Alan has asked for. When this was done I added the balloon tails and connectors, placing them behind the rest, and since the borders crossed the tails I added another small section of yellow fill with no border to cover each of those overlaps. A pretty complicated process for this style, and there’s a lot of it, but I think it achieves what Alan suggested.

On a later page Mina’s trip has taken her spirit right out of her body, and for that we needed another style, and a different one for the evil astral spirit she encounters there, floating above the concert. Alan writes about Mina:

HER WORD BALLOONS HERE…AND INDEED THROUGHOUT THIS ASTRAL SEQUENCE…SHOULD MAYBE HAVE SOME KIND OF RAINBOW JELLY EDGE TO THEM, OR COLOURED LETTERING, OR WHATEVER ELSE TODD THINKS WOULD WORK BEST TO CONVEY THE FACT THAT THIS IS MINA’S ASTRAL VOICE THAT SHE’S USING HERE.

Small problem, I’d already used the rainbow effects for the earlier tripping panels, but I saw no reason why I couldn’t use them again here, since it’s all related.

I followed the same plan, but with a medium blue border that I hoped would contrast enough from the previous magenta one to give it at least some individuality. The rainbow gradients are also slightly paler. As it turned out, Ben colored Mina’s astral form in yellows, so that all worked well, I thought.

For the other spirit, Alan writes (with one name deleted to keep from from any possible plot spoiling):

AS WITH MINA, _____’S SPEECH BALLOON HERE SHOULD HAVE A SIMILAR KIND OF DIFFERENT EDGE, TO DENOTE THAT THIS IS _____’S ASTRAL VOICE TALKING. SINCE HIS SPIRIT IS MUCH DARKER AND MORE MONSTROUS THAN MINA’S, MAYBE YOU COULD MAKE _____’S SPEECH-BALLOON EDGING OR COLOURING RELECT THIS, WHILE KEEPING IT IN THE SAME BASIC STYLE AS MINA’S, TODD?

I thought the way to go was with gradients made from dark and mismatched colors for the balloon fill, and the lettering and balloon borders would be reversed out of that in a hopefully disturbing yellow-orange:

I’m not sure how successfully dark and evil it is, but at least it’s a stark contrast to Mina’s balloon style, sort of the antithesis of it. For this character I decided not to give the lettering a wavy distortion, thinking he’s more in control of his astral state, and the lettering should reflect that.

As you’ll eventually see when the book comes out, the styles for Terner, Mina and the evil spirit are used often in the climactic sequence of pages, all intertwined, and it was a lot of work getting it together, but I’m happy with the result. Hope you like it as well. Kevin and Alan both still have to give their final thumbs up, so if anything looks different in the end, that’ll be why. It’s always a fun and interesting challenge working with them, and I’m already looking forward the third and final issue of the CENTURY series, though I expect it will be a while before I see pages to letter.

Image © Jim Campbell.

I never seem to have time to write much about lettering anymore, but someone else is stepping into the breach. British letterer Jim Campbell has recently begun a new blog with the focus on lettering how-to’s, critiques, and helpful hints, among other things. You can find it HERE. And as soon as I get a chance I’ll be adding it to my Blogroll on the left, which is due for some updating…a number of the folks on it can’t seem to be bothered to post even once a month, so out they go, and new ones will be chosen. Hope I can get back to writing about logos and lettering sometime soon, but it’s been non-stop hectic for me since at least June. Hence the reviews, which take less time.

I received an email recently from David Norman that I thought might lead to an interesting topic here. With his permission, here’s an excerpt:

I’ve been a long-time reader of your blog, and I was wondering if you could answer my question, as noted in the subject heading: why is the double hyphen still used in comic book lettering when the en-dash (or em-dash) is so much more elegant? I can’t see any reason for it other than “that’s the way it’s always been done.” As the source of all things lettering, I hope you would be able to tell me.

First, let’s be clear on the terms used above, as they appear in print. A hyphen (or regular dash) is what connects words like four-color, and also used when a word is broken into two lines, or hyphenated. An en-dash is a longer line, rarely used, but sometimes seen between parts of a phone number as in 555–1212. In many fonts it’s nearly indistinguishable from a hyphen. An em-dash, so called because it’s about the length of the lower case “m”, is used to indicate a quick pause in speech,  or set off a brief interruption in a statement, such as “His first thought—if there was one—was to scream.”

Another bit of punctuation that is similar to the em-dash is the ellipsis, a series of three periods: … which can indicate a missing word in a sentence, or again a pause in thought, but a more leisurely one. A good example is from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” when the title character says, “I never drink…wine.”

This and all images © DC Comics, Inc.

Punctuation in comics was fluid and erratic in the early days, not surprising for a new medium. Letterers, whether they were the artist on the story or a separate person, pretty much made their own choices as they went along. In these panels from the very first Superman story from the 1930s, the first caption begins with an ellipsis, continuing a sentence from the panel before it, and ends with a double dash (or double hyphen if you like), indicating the sentence continues further. But the next caption again begins with an ellipsis, so a more logical thing to put at the end of the first caption would have also been an ellipsis. That’s how I was taught to do it when I began lettering in 1977: connect two parts of a sentence with EITHER a pair of ellipses or a pair of double dashes.

Why the double dash instead of the em-dash? As you can see in the doctor’s balloon above, a very long em-dash is used there, and you do see it in some older comics stories. But when comics got to the point where scripts were typed out on a typewriter for someone to copy when lettering, the usual way to indicate an em-dash was a double dash, since there was no em-dash symbol on a typewriter. Typesetters and printers knew to convert the double dash to an em-dash when a typewritten script was copied into set type, but letterers probably didn’t know or follow that convention, and the double dash gradually became the common form.

Here are two panels from one of the first Batman stories in DETECTIVE COMICS #31, 1939. The caption ends with an ellipsis indicating an open-ended statement, another common use of it. But the doctor’s balloon below has a real hodge-podge of punctuation. After the second YES is what I think is meant to be an em-dash, but it’s quite short and aligned with the bottom of the letters instead of the center. Another longer one is below. And after the word PARIS are two periods, which are meant to be an ellipsis. You can find similar uses with from two to about six periods in old comics, perhaps showing that letterers then didn’t really know what they were supposed to be putting in. And the final word is underlined instead of emphasized in the more usual way by making it bolder, or bold and italicized. I can still remember DC editor Julie Schwartz yelling at me when I made a similar mistake just starting out in lettering, “We NEVER underline in comics!”

In this FLASH story from 1949, toward the end of the Golden Age, lettering has become more standardized, at least at DC Comics, but there are still some odd variations in the dots and dashes here. In the first panel we have ellipses that are centered vertically on the letters instead of aligned with the bottoms, as they are in the caption. And in the other balloons we have some double dashes, and also some longer single dashes—about the size of an en-dash—performing the same function.

A few years later, in this first Silver Age FLASH story from 1956, probably lettered by Gaspar Saladino, the punctuation has become much more standardized, with only the double dash, ellipsis and hyphen used. Editor Julie Schwartz may have had a hand in this, as he was big on rules and traditions.

So, to finally answer the original question by David, here’s what I had to say:

Yes, it’s all about tradition. When comics began, scripts were produced on a typewriter, and the common typewritten version of an em-dash was a double-hyphen. That became part of the comics vocabulary, and remains so for many readers, not to mention writers and editors. I sometimes use the em-dash when I’m lettering in upper and lower case, but when using the traditional all upper-case style, the double hyphen is what looks best to me.