 |
| Glamourpuss #1 (April 2008) Art by Dave Sim |
DAVE SIM:
(from the 100 Hours Tour: TCJ, 30 Januray 2008)
On the subject of the lettering on glamourpuss, I think the Joe Kubert font is better suited to the Raymond School work that I'm doing
on glamourpuss. I got nominated for awards for lettering...and was
fortunate enough to win a Harvey... but it sure wasn't for the straight
narrative lettering. My lettering is idiosyncratic but Joe's is a pretty
close match to Ben Oda who lettered most of the newspaper strips. Not
Raymond's though. If I was at home I could refer to my copy of Tom
Roberts' ALEX RAYMOND book I picked up today at Carry On in Waterloo and
tell you the name of his two letterers... But, the biggest reason for using a computer font is that I'm
able to edit the text right up to the last minute. Hand lettering you
have a tendency to just "let it go" because there's no easy way white
out whole passages and re-letter over the white out. I can understand you not being thrilled at it, but it's really a
"writer over letterer" debate. I'm judge, jury and executioner,
unfortunately.
2 comments:
Dave Sim. Greatest Letterer of All Time.
Now I want a Comicraft font already!!!
The whole reason I quit doing comics was I hated lettering with such a white, hot passion, that it destroyed whatever sense of "labor of love" I was operating under (because I definitely wasn't making any money at it). The task of lettering slowed me down as a writer, took me completely out of my story-telling mindset. Having to letter over growing mounds of white-out topography was like something out of a nightmare. I would often ruin entire pages while lettering, in my efforts to "get it right", and repeatedly found myself throwing away a full day's work to start from scratch. This was back in the 90's, when using a computer to generate lettering wasn't something you saw among the respected professionals of the medium, so to a guy like me - totally unknown but wanting to create something of substance - "Writer over letterer" was never a debate or even an option within my mind. My stance was, if I sucked at lettering, I sucked at comics, and had no business trying to pretend otherwise. In hindsight, I sucked at all of it, but I do wonder if the other parts would have flourished in the wake of a decision to go digital with the lettering.
Sample of my terrible lettering:
http://www.slac.com/dust/first.htm
Post a Comment