The Letterer

By D. Lynn Smith

We already talked about the writer…the person who puts lots of words on the page that the reader never sees. What the reader does see is the work of the letterer.

The letterer is responsible for every word and balloon you see on the page, whether it be a caption, a thought balloon, a dialog balloon or a sound effect. They choose the font, the text size, and the shape of the balloons. They also determine the size and shape of each border (rectangle for caption or oval for dialog) and, in the case of my comics anyway, the placement of the balloons.

The placement of the balloons on the page help the reader know what to read first. Let’s say you have a balloon at the top of the page on the right-hand-side of the panel. Then there’s a balloon at the bottom of the panel on the left hand side. Will you read left to right? No, you read the top balloon first.

The shape of the balloon can tell you all kinds of things. If someone is yelling and angry:

Or startled:

Or maybe they are reading a letter:

And then there are the panels where there are multiple lines of dialog by one person, broken up by another’s lines. The letterer uses connections to keep from having numerous tails going to one character…

There are all kinds of rules that a letterer must keep in mind when lettering a panel. For example,don’t interrupt the eyeline between two people. The longest line or word in the dialog should be in the center of the dialog bubble. A square block of dialog inside a round bubble leaves a big white space that covers the art for no reason.

The tail of the balloon should always point to the mouth of the character, not the hand (though I know a lot of people who talk with their hands) and not the ears.

And the biggest rule, don’t cover the art.

There are also the ascetics to each bubble. For instance, Nikki Foxrobot, who lettered the first issue of Gates of Midnight, had these nice long tails on the bubbles that I just loved. When Jessica Jimerson took over on Issue #2, she had shorter tails. I asked her to make them longer, which she did.

Hopefully the reader isn’t thinking about any of these things. The art of the letterer means that they are invisible. Once the reader gets hooked into the story the words on the page blend into the art and the reader is swept away into a world of art and imagination.

Once again this is just a short overview of the art of the letterer. A comic book can be completely ruined by a letterer who doesn’t know what they are doing. On the other side of the coin, a comic book can be greatly enhanced by a good letterer.

Next week we hear from our letterer Jessica Jimerson on how she came to be a letter and the art behind what she does. So stay tuned…