Aditya, I always like to ask my interviewees how they got into comics and what it was that made you want to make comics?
I got into comics as a writer – I’d been writing prose since I was about 12, and I’d always read comics, but that was limited to Archie, Tintin, and Indian publications like Tinkle and Raj Comics. I came across one of those “Comics Aren’t For Kids Anymore” articles in the film magazine Sight & Sound, and that pointed me towards books like Sin City, Watchmen and City of Glass. It was when I read the City of Glass graphic novel adaptation that I realised how much there was to explore in the comics format as a writer.
I started making my own comics with a couple of Indian artists – this would be around 2008-2009 – and since there was no Indian letterer to my knowledge, I had to teach myself how to letter a comic. I found it to be a very interesting craft – it’s such a specific mix of design, typography and calligraphy, and the letterer gets so much control over how the comic is read. So I quit trying to write for a living, and leaned into lettering. It’s only got more interesting to me since then.
Interesting that you went from wanting to write for a living to leaning into lettering, I’ve seen you express a desire to letter less and do more with writing recently. This is a sentiment we share but I’ve never expressly said it in public before. What do you think is behind this shift for you?
The primary reason I quit writing in the first place was that I couldn’t find a balance between writing for myself and writing for money. I found myself losing what was interesting to me in the first place about writing, and investigating every new idea for commercial viability. That struck me as an unhealthy relationship with the writing, at least for me, so I focussed on lettering because it’s something I enjoy on the craft level – even a bad day lettering is not too bad, while a bad day of writing could be soul-crushing.
I took time off the writing – I think I had two or three stories published in the last eight years, and those were written for pleasure. I spent the last eight years investigating that pleasure – what kind of stories genuinely interested me, what did I want the process to be, and so on. Getting back in touch with the love of writing that had made me write one-and-a-half (terrible) novels as a teenager just because it was a fun thing to do.
I feel I have a better idea of those things now, and because I have a day job that I also love, I can write without worrying about getting things published or making money off the writing (though that’d be nice), and what I write is that much more authentic and honest for that. Now that I have a better grasp of what I want to do, it feels like the right time to put more time into it.
What’s your approach for creating a lettering style on a given book?
The first thing I look at when I’m creating a lettering style is the line quality of the artist. I want to do something that matches that, for one thing. Then I try and choose a font that has a similar line quality and weight, but which also suits the mood and tone of the book. I create 3-4 options, combining different fonts and balloon styles, starting with a straightforward style and getting increasingly wacky. The idea is to give the team something to explore – it’s fine if one of the styles is entirely off-the-wall if we like one element of it enough to use it in a different style. Then I sit with the team and we mix-and-match and come up with something we all like. (I follow the design credo of never offering an option I wouldn’t be happy seeing on the book.) Sometimes, though, I see a book and I just know what it needs, and for those (Coffin Bound, for example), I’ll send a single option along with an essay-length email making a case for it, to which I usually get the reply, “Calm down, Bidi. If you feel that strongly about it…”
You do some books with traditional hand lettering—despite that being awesome on a purely craft level, what the hell is wrong with you?!—and how do you decide what book(s) you do that for?
Haha, the honest answer is, I wanted to learn how to hand-letter, and I find that deadlines offer me a bracing cocktail of clarity, focus and sheer terror. So it was easier to declare I would hand-letter a book, and then figure out how to do it.
As with a lot of books I take on, how I decided to do it is more about the people than about the book. Few writers are okay with me saying, if I’m hand-lettering this, I’ll give you digital placements, and that’s the last time you can edit the text. Ram, on the other hand, just went, well, if it’s going to be worth it, sure. And once we’d decided that, he gave me the space to actually learn how to hand-letter, which meant a lot of initial failure. Ram was the one who kept saying, look, we have time, and if you find you can’t do it, we’ll go digital, but for now, why don’t you keep exploring?
But I offered to do it for Grafity’s Wall and Blue in Green because I thought that digital lettering would take away from what made these books special. As Ram is fond of saying, certain books need to look like somebody sat down and made them by hand – crafted them – rather than produced them. And there’s a quality to hand-lettering that’s not present in the most organic-looking digital lettering. For these two books, it was that combination of the books and the people involved.
Like other letterers, though, I am obsessed with making my process more efficient, so for the second book, I figured out a digital hand-lettering process that retained what’s interesting about hand-lettering while being more editable and taking less time. Hopefully, this’ll make it less expensive for prospective clients, and perhaps there’ll be more hand-lettering in my future. Even now, I’m planning to hand-letter at least one graphic novella in 2021, both because the artwork feels like it needs it, and because the writer (for once, not Ram) felt strongly that we should try and hand-letter it.
Philosophically speaking, comic-book fonts have democratised both comics and lettering, and I think that’s a good thing, because I started out ten years ago (whew) as a digital letterer who couldn’t have hand-lettered at gunpoint. But as the form progresses, we shouldn’t lose what was great about the old way of doing it. Right now, other than John Workman, I can’t think of anybody who hand-letters comics who is a full-time letterer – Dustin Harbin, Kurt Ankeny, Galen Showman, Stan Sakai are all artists who occasionally hand-letter comics for themselves or other people – and I think it’s a pity that when people want hand-lettering, they don’t immediately think of professional letterers. The next step for me, I guess, is to be good enough to letter on the board. More terror. Yay.
You’re—in my opinion—one of the best letterers around. Part of that I think is due to your respect of the craft itself, it’s history, and your ruminating on what good lettering is going forward. Where do see the craft in five years? Ten? Are you still a letter that likes to write, or a writer that used to letter?
Thank you so much, and likewise – you have been an inspiration to me, and I love how versatile and investigative you are in your work. Each book you do is distinctive and interesting in its own way.
Speaking in general, I feel like comics lettering five years from now is going to be much more alive and energetic as a field. You can see it in digital colouring right now – the kinks of how things need to be done on a basic level have been figured out, and the artistry is showing through. Five years from now, I see lettering being the same. In one direction, more people will be hand-lettering – digitally and on paper. At this point, I think I’ve managed to get the method down to be as cost-effective and production-friendly as possible, and I’m sure people like Harbin and Ankeny have their methods, so it’ll continue to get easier. In the other direction, what digital lettering means will also evolve. The direction for that lies in things like the contextual alternates that Nate Piekos is using in his recent fonts, and in Photoshop integration for sound effects the way Hassan OE and Thomas Mauer use it. Lettering in Illustrator, we are limited by how much we can touch the art, but I’m sure the process will evolve and we’ll see far more organic things happening digitally. The basic “house-style” work – I don’t see that changing or evolving much in that time, but around the edges, I think things are only going to get cooler and more interesting.
Ten years is more difficult to gauge. Either we’ll get the credit and recognition we feel we deserve, or it’s robots all the way. Who can tell.
Personally, the other aspect of my cutting down on lettering work (other than writing) is that I want to learn type design more systematically. I’ve been playing with the software for a few years now, and I’ve made 4-5 fonts that I use in my own work, but I think it’s time for me to get serious about it, do some learning, and set up my own foundry. Hopefully five years from now, that’ll be in full swing, and you’ll see my fonts being used in comics alongside those from Blambot and Comicraft. Ten years from now, I’m a hermit who lives entirely on the passive income that generates. Fingers crossed.
But I definitely see myself as a letterer who writes, because I can’t make writing my main thing again – it’s too stressful, and I’d rather do it for love.
Can you walk us through your process for hand-lettering? Don’t spare any nuts and bolts.
I have written detailed accounts of the process for both Grafity’s Wall and now Blue in Green, but those are intended for non-letterers, so while you get a sense of my aesthetic exploration from those, I haven’t written about the actual nuts-and-bolts process, and I’m delighted that you asked, because I’m going to assume it’s all us letterers here, and I don’t have to hold back.
Grafity’s Wall:
I’ve written about how I landed on the right size and style in the process post, so I’ll skip that and go straight to how each page was lettered. (You can check that out here: https://unbound.com/books/grafitys-wall/updates/writing-between-the-lines)
I would get the tiff file once the inking was done, and I would add crop marks to the edges, blow it up to A4 height, and then knock out the black and replace it with a light cyan (this is why I preferred working on the inks rather than the colours). I’d print that out on cartridge paper to letter on it.
In the meantime, I’d do a digital placement file for Ram (yes, I’d be lettering each page twice, but this version was always really sloppy) using a font that’d take up around the same amount of space (I think it was J Scott Campbell Lower from Comicraft). We’d use this to edit the dialogue, because we couldn’t fix anything other than minor typos once the book was fully lettered.
Based on those placements, I’d draw guides on the printed-out version of the page (this was when editorial placements suddenly started making sense to me), and I’d pencil out the dialogue to make sure I wasn’t covering faces or anything important. Then I’d letter it, and this bit didn’t take too long – it was everything that came afterwards that was the real pain in the ass and I constantly wished we had production people for this like in the old days.
Once the lettering was done, I’d scan the lettering, knock out all the cyan so only the black was left, and I’d use the crop marks to resize this down to comics size and align it with the page in Photoshop. Then I’d set the lettering layer to multiply (so the white would disappear, and the black would overprint correctly – this was also when I’d apply a threshold action to make sure the black was 100K and not rich black), and I’d fill in the balloons with white on a layer beneath that (this was my least favourite part, and I’d always make sure to do this over colours, because there’s nothing quite as annoying as the art showing through bits of your balloons and then having to check every page).
(The sizing up and sizing down was for two reasons – first, Anand drew the pages at A4, and I wanted to react to the art as he’d drawn it, and sizing the lettering down makes it looks smoother too.)
I drew the sound effects on paper too, so I’d take those to a separate layer and colourise them and play with them digitally so they looked organic. Ideally I would’ve liked to hand those to the colourist to mess with, like you’d do with proper hand-lettering, but I don’t think the process could’ve accommodated that.
The chapter titles were all digitally done in Photoshop, and I convinced myself that was okay because old-timey hand-letterers would occasionally use printed type in their work. Still, one of those was digitally hand-lettered and the other was a font I cobbled together based on an old Bollywood movie poster, so I like to think I wasn’t slacking off.
Once all the pages were done, we did a round of catching typos and egregious mistakes, and I still have a piece of paper somewhere with what looks like random words and phrases that I then scanned and used to make corrections.
Blue in Green:
Again, details on the aesthetic choices are in the process post, I’m just happy you used the words “nuts and bolts” and let me run wild. (And you can check that out here: https://adityab.substack.com/p/strange-animals-26oct2020-feeling)
I lettered this on the iPad, and used the time between the two books to get any kinks out of the process, so this one was smooth sailing.
I made a page in Photoshop with guides spaced at 2mm height with 0.5mm leading (I tend to letter inside the lines, so the usually recommended 1mm leading was far too tall for me), and I exported that to Sketch on the iPad. We did digital placements again (this time using CC’s Ask for Mercy), and after Ram’s notes, I used that to get a sense of the stacking while I lettered on the iPad. As I noted in my process post, some pages were lettered before the art was done, and for those, I had to guess at the stacking and then fix it while compiling in Photoshop later.
I tested out a bunch of custom brushes and tweaked them endlessly to get the right one. I did a few print tests before we started making the book to make sure it didn’t print too thin or anything like that.
Once the basic lettering was done, I used Photoshop Sketch’s integration with Creative Cloud to access the files on my laptop. There, I’d downsize the lettering from 600dpi to 450dpi, to match the art dimensions and, again, so it smooths out. By this point I had a nice little Photoshop action set up that’d create all the layers I needed for the work. I’d paste in the letters, and use the pen tool to draw balloons. Then I’d go over those to create the borders (as you can see in the book, the balloons and the lines are deliberately slightly misaligned).
As you can see, the process not only had fewer steps, it was also shorter and more flexible. With Grafity, I think I could manage 6-8 pages a day, while with Blue in Green, it was more like 10, which is getting close to my normal lettering speed.
I ask everyone I interview…If you could only give one piece of advice, be it for lettering, or life, what would it be?
This is advice for creative people that I think applies to everyone else. It’s fine to have ambition and goals with what you do, but when you’re trying to decide what to dedicate your life to, make sure you enjoy the daily grind of it. It’s no fun if you want to be a novelist but hate sitting down and putting the words in. Results are occasional, but the process is daily. Make sure you like the process.
https://adityab.net/lettering/
