Images © DC Comics, Inc. and Todd Klein.

One of the books I letter regularly is FAIREST, a spinoff from FABLES. It concentrates on the many strong female characters, the “princesses” if you will, of the FABLES universe. So far there have been story arcs about Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, the latter taking place in Japan. When I received the script for issue 15, the beginning of a new story arc written by Sean E. Williams, I learned that it would take place in the FABLES version of India, which Sean calls Indu, and I found this note near the beginning:

Todd: All the “Indu” dialogue and captions should appear in a Devanagari-esque font to indicate they’re speaking a non-English language (which is most of the six issues).

This is not the first time I’ve been asked to letter in the style of a particular language. In fact, I’ve created fonts that, while still readable English, suggest the appearance of Arabic, German Blackletter, Chinese (capitals in inked brushwork), Russian (Cyrillic), Greek, Norse Runes, and Tibetan. But though I’ve designed over 120 fonts since 1994, none of them were close enough to Devanagari (the alphabet used for Hindi and other languages) to work. I needed to design some new fonts!

First I did some research online, looking for examples of hand-lettered Devangari alphabets. The one above appealed to me, and I decided to use it as a style guide. The most important identifying characteristic of this alphabet to my eye was the strong horizontal bar at the top of most letters. When run together in words and sentences, this gives an impression of a horizontal line that all the characters hang from. Beyond that, there were lots of vertical bars and handsome curves. Very few of these glyphs could be used directly in English, though. To give me more ideas, I made another copy flopped left to right:

Looking at them this way, I saw more shapes I could use to simulate Devangari in English. With these two images printed out, I sat at my drawing board, drew in some horizontal guidelines, and began drawing an alphabet or two.

Here’s what I drew, and with much of it inked. I felt the direction worked well, I was getting as much of that top horizontal line as possible, but I wasn’t happy with my inking. Normally there are plenty of small imperfections in hand-lettered glyphs like these that help give the final font a looser, more hand-made look, but in this case I wanted all those horizontal strokes to be dead even and consistent. So, I scanned this stuff, placed it in an Adobe Illustrator document, grayed it down, opened a new layer, and drew the letters over the drawing using the pen tool.

Here’s the result. The Italic font is simply the regular one slanted. The Bold Italic version is the slanted one with a black outline, and some adjustments made. When I drew the letters I used a wedge-tipped “brush” that gave the strokes the same kind of thick and thin line weights as my hand-drawn pen points, which were also wedge-tipped. While I could have drawn numbers and punctuation, I decided to save time by using existing ones from another of my fonts.

At the top is a partial character set from my font ToddKlone-Wedge. (I’ve left out all the international characters and punctuation.) Below is the new font TKIndu-Regular with the new characters dropped in, and the numbers and punctuation from the existing font retained. As with all my traditional comic book fonts, there are no lower case letters, those spaces are filled with slightly different upper case glyphs, for variety. If you compare this to the drawn font above you’ll see some changes were made, the most obvious in the letters D and M. I had begun lettering with the previous version and my editor, Shelly Bond, felt the fonts were a bit hard to read, so we agreed on those changes. I also made smaller adjustments and changes on many of the other glyphs to help with readability.

Creating the glyphs is the fun part of font creation, and the quick part. The rest is the dull drudgery of spacing and kerning: adjusting the space between each pair of glyphs so that it all looks right when you use the font. I saved a lot of time by working with an existing font, but even so, each of the three new fonts: TKIndu Regular, Italic and Bold Italic took about eight hours to kern. I could have taken more shortcuts by only kerning the most likely problem pairs like TA and LY, but I just can’t work that way. I’d rather put the time in at the kerning stage, and know that I won’t have to make repeated adjustments at the lettering stage.

The top image in this post is from the finished page 1, using my new fonts except for the identifying tags in the credits like “writer” and “letters.” (That’s another of my fonts, TKOrnate.) Here’s a closer look at the fonts as they will appear in the printed comic, FAIREST #15, due out next Wednesday. Of course, the art will look a lot better, and be in color! Hope it works as intended, suggesting the Hindi language while still being relatively easy to read. Let me know what you think!

Images © DC Comics, Inc.

In 1983 DC decided to revamp two of Superman’s oldest foes, with ACTION COMICS writer Marv Wolfman giving them new back stories and I think artist/designer Ed Hannigan giving them new visuals. They first appeared on the cover of this issue:

As you can see, the new version of Luthor put him in a Kirby-like space suit, while the new Brainiac made him a rather scary robot. I was asked to letter new logos for them, but I don’t think they were intended to be cover logos, at least I don’t see them on any covers of the period that I’ve looked at. Probably they were used on interior splash pages, and possibly also for licensing of the new looks. They did appear on these versions of the characters in WHO’S WHO IN THE DC UNIVERSE in 1986-87, but when John Byrne revamped the entire Superman mythos a few years later, these versions were retired, and as far as I know have not been back (though I could certainly be wrong about that). The lettering I did was on regular DC art board the way I would have handled cover lettering rather than a cover logo, and I suspect that’s how I was paid as well. Consequently, I didn’t spend as much time finessing the designs as I might have, but I still think the Brainiac one is pretty good.

Images © Dark Horse Comics and Neil Gaiman.

Readers of DARK HORSE PRESENTS #21 will not only have a fine selection of stories to peruse, they’ll be able to view a historic moment in comics lettering history.

On pages 25 to 31 is a story with NEW lettering by The Master, Gaspar Saladino. The story itself is not completely new. Another version with different art was released by Neil as a limited edition print a few years ago. This version was produced in 2012, I believe, with great art by Paul Chadwick, and lettered by Gaspar, probably on vellum overlays. Last year I wrote about Gaspar’s first new lettering for comics in quite a while in THIS article, but that was for a proposal that is still unpublished, as far as I know. The story in DHP, then represents Gaspar’s first PUBLISHED lettering in a number of years.

Here’s the first page in full, looking quite good. The story has only captions, and Gaspar was asked to “float” them, in other words, not to put them in boxes, and using his standard style.

A closer look at the lettering. Gaspar is my favorite letterer of all time, and looking at this, my reaction is, “He’s still got it.”

Last year I wrote a series of blog posts revealing my research into Gaspar’s very first lettering for DC Comics. In the third part I identified that first work as appearing in ROMANCE TRAIL #5, cover-dated March-April, 1950. Because of the way comics are dated ahead of when they actually go on sale, that work had to be completed in 1949, and was probably on newsstands in January of 1950. Therefore, the new lettering by Gaspar represents an astounding career span of at least 63 years of published work! And who knows, perhaps there will be more! I hope so. Long live The Master!

Two more lettercolumn headings, or at least the lettering/title part. Above, for TEEN TITANS SPOTLIGHT, in my standard open block lettering, and not too dissimilar to the book’s logo, which was designed by Gaspar Saladino:

I don’t have the comics anymore, but I imagine the blue rectangle is where the address and such went on the final lettercolumn masthead.

Below is “Purple Prose” for AMETHYST, PRINCESS OF GEMWORLD. This looks like I set up some type on staff at DC, either with the Varityper Headliner or with rub-down type, and then traced that to create open lettering. The style of the script is not one I would have created from scratch. Perhaps artist Ernie Colon had a font in mind for it. I think I have his art for the lettercolumn heading somewhere, that may turn up in another of these posts.

I love books and I love lettering. While I usually focus on fiction when I’m looking through old book stores and used book sales, occasionally a visit to the Art section will turn up a treasure like this, an ideal reference book for hand-lettering of the past. This one was published in 1914.

The title page with the author’s monogram. This book is pretty old-fashioned, leaning heavily toward Art Nouveau which was already going out of style I think, but it has lots of great work and interesting alphabets and lettering samples.

I look through it from time to time for ideas. I don’t do much hand lettering any more, but there are places where I can still use it, in my own prints for instance.

Berglin was clearly good at what he did, and published several other similar books that I haven’t seen. This one was reprinted in paperback by Dover Books at some point, though I don’t see it in their current catalog.

On Facebook, a group of letterers are talking about this similar book by Sam Welo from 1927.

Welo is another fine craftsman, and his book has been a long-time reference for ace letterer Tom Orzechowski.

Some of the pages could fit right in with the older book I have, like this one.

Others are more obviously from the 1920s, and lean toward Art Deco and showcard lettering of that period.

You can clearly see in it not only the styles used in advertising through the 1940s, but also the kind of logo and title design used in early comics as well as pulps, slick magazines, movie posters, film titles and so on. Lots more interesting ideas, and much of it can be found online HERE.

Styles have changed a lot, and this sort of thing is dated now, but still useful for reference and inspiration, especially when going for a period look. Keep an eye out for this sort of volume when you’re book-hunting.

Images © DC Comics, Inc.

Letter columns are something that most comics had when I was a kid, and while on staff at DC from 1977-87 they were still doing them. That meant each new title needed a letter column header, including lettering for a title—usually some kind of play on words involving the book’s name or main character—and a small bit of art to put next to it. Here’s the lettering by me and art by Keith Giffen for AMBUSH BUG, probably for the 1985 four-issue series, and perhaps also used on the SON OF AMBUSH BUG six-issue series that followed it. I’m not sure why I still have the art, it should have been returned to Giffen long ago, but it got stuck in my files instead. I doubt Keith misses it. The lettering is in the style of the logo I designed for the title.

Here’s another, just the lettering I did for the VIGILANTE letter column heading. The art must have been done, as I’ve made a loose placement sketch of it in blue pencil. The block lettering style is similar to one used by Gaspar Saladino, but notice where the indented point is on the right side of the R, about halfway down the central horizontal stroke. Gaspar would have put it at the bottom of the horizontal stroke, one easy way to tell my block lettering from his, other than, you know, his being a lot better!

Image © Rob Liefeld.

Hand-lettered rather large in the style of Ira Schnapp, this appeared on the inside front covers of SUPREME #41-52 and served as the ongoing story title for those Alan Moore-written issues. I no longer recall who suggested going this route, but it was probably Alan. I think I was the one who found appropriate old DC Comics house ads to imitate, pulling ideas from several of them. Scanned from the original lettering in my files. Lots of other Ira Schnapp and Gaspar Saladino lettering homages appeared in the issues.