Thursday, April 29, 2010

Man of Letters

I thought I'd do a post on lettering, seeing as how I've been nominated for an Eisner Award for it and all. I've touched on the topic before, but it's been quite a while and I've learned a bit since last time.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a professional letterer! I have a lot of respect for those who are. I don't know if everything below is optimal or even right. If you want to tap the brain of a master, go visit Todd Klein. This post is just based on my experience, the lessons I've learned and mistakes I've made. I get by.

Lettering in comics is important, and too often overlooked or an afterthought. Neat, legible lettering can make the difference between work that looks like that of a novice or a pro. Where the words are placed on the page is critical--absolutely critical--to how the reader's eye is guided through the action. It can control pace and convey urgency, confusion, anger, and other moods and emotions.

It can also reveal something about a character. Some of the smartest lettering in comics was done for Walt Kelly's "Pogo," where a deacon spoke in ornate Gothic script and a showman pattered in circus-poster bluster. A more subtle example is Marvel Comics' character The Vision, an android who often spoke in rectangular yellow word balloons to suggest an eerie mechanical voice different from everyone else's.

Pogo's P.T. Bridgeport sounds like W.C. Fields to me.

The spooky-voiced Vision (right) versus . . . Captain Space Pirate Zombie? I read this one long ago but don't remember.

Lettering serves different purposes in different types of comics. The slickest, cleanest, most professional lettering tends to show up in mainstream comic books and some comic strips--you might think of them as the more "corporate" or studio-produced products. It serves its purpose of telling the story without calling attention to itself; when it's done right, no one notices. In contrast, comics produced by a single creative vision often have unique, idiosyncratic lettering, usually that of the auteur him/herself. The lettering of Charles Schulz and Robert Crumb is instantly recognizable and as integral to their work as their words and pictures.

A person's handwriting is an intimate thing--think how much more a handwritten note means than an e-mail, or how an unexpected glimpse of grandma's graceful cursive can conjure powerful memories. Lettering gives a story a voice and personality. As a cartoonist, it's worth putting some thought and effort into.

In Which We Learn by Fumbling
Until recently in comics history, lettering was always done directly on the paper the art was drawn on, and was the first ink to hit the paper. Lettering first, to make sure it was placed right and had enough room, then art. Many cartoonists still work that way, but increasingly the lettering is done digitally and placed after the art is complete. I've done both.

On Mom's Cancer, I lettered directly on the page, just how it looks in print. I lightly pencilled guidelines onto the paper, with the space between lines of text half as high as the letters themselves (e.g., letters 6 mm high with 3 mm line spacing ("leading") between). How large you actually make your letters depends on the size of your original and published art, whether for print or web; that'll take some trial and error. Easy legibility is the goal. Take into account the fact that some readers may have worse eyesight than you and err on the side of writing too big. Fat, wide letters read better than thin, crowded ones.
Hand lettering should have a nice, relaxed flow to it, not look too fussy and cramped. You can fall into a very pleasant rhythmic groove while lettering. Find a pen that gives you the look you want. For example, some of the best letterers use calligraphy-style flat nibs that vary their line width depending on the angle of the stroke. They take a lot of practice but can look great. I've always preferred a uniform line weight for my letters, and so used Speedball nibs B-5 and B-6, which have a round tip. I enjoyed the look, feel, and ritual of dipping a pen in ink but you could also use a fountain pen or even a dark, permanent felt-tip.
I love the authenticity and hand-crafted quality of lettering by hand. But here's what happened as a result: If I needed to correct something, I either whited out the original and relettered, or lettered the fix on a separate piece of paper and pasted it on (at first physically, later digitally). When we got around to preparing Mom's Cancer for print, my editor made some edits; more relettering and pasting. If we wanted to shrink or delete a word balloon, I had to redraw the art around it to fit. Later, when it came time to translate Mom's Cancer into other languages, I had to digitally erase all the lettering so the translators could fit new text into the existing balloons (which, depending on the language, may have been too large or small). In general, changing anything was a huge chore.

None of that was efficient or fun. As much as I love and respect old-timey ink on paper, I decided to march boldly into the 21st century (or at least tiptoe warily into the late 20th) and letter digitally. But I still wanted my lettering to be un-sterile and reflect me as much as possible. So I set out to convert my own handprinting into a computer font.

Rise of the Machines
Now, there are websites that will do that cheaply or free. You print your letters on a template, scan it, upload it, and a few minutes later they'll send you a font ready to install on your computer. I tried that and found the results inadequate. The resolution and quality were poor, as was the kerning (more on that in a sec). It might have been fun for sending notes to family but wasn't good enough for professional work. Your mileage may vary.

On the recommendation of a cartooning friend, I purchased a program called FontCreator. This isn't a plug, there are competing products that might be as good or better. But FontCreator could do everything I wanted plus a ton of things I didn't want or even understand. It's overpowered for my needs. I wanted a Hyundai and got a Ferrari. Still, it wasn't hard to figure out the basics. Using letters sampled from Mom's Cancer, I had a pretty good digital font up and running in a day.

Something To Think About #1: Fonts have upper- and lower-case letters. Comics are generally lettered in all upper-case. What to do with the lower-case letters you don't need? Make them upper-case, too, so that you have two versions of every letter. Especially when a letter repeats, making them slightly different subtly softens the mechanical perfection of digital.

How this works: in my custom font, upper- and lower-case letters are both represented as capitals penned slightly differently, which breaks up the monotonous regularity of digital type.

Note the "I" in the middle of that anguished cry above. It's sorta important. One of the conventions of comics lettering is that the "I" has serifs (the little horizontal lines at top and bottom) when it refers to oneself and doesn't when it's part of a word. So the "I" in "I," "I'd," "I've," etc. should have serifs, while the "I" in "serifs" shouldn't. Take a look back up at that panel of the Vision vs. Captain Space Pirate Zombie and the words "I must admit." See? So in my handmade font I made my capital "I" with serifs and my lower-case "i" without. Sadly, this is a fine point of craft that more and more people who make a living slinging letters don't seem to know anymore.
To write this in my font, I typed "I like ice."

Something to Think About #2: Kerning, or how your letters are squished together. Letters have different shapes and need different amounts of elbow room. Letters like "T" and "V" are top-heavy; letters like "A" and "L" are bottom-heavy. Kerning is the art (and it is an art) of overlapping differently shaped letters so they look good together.
For example, the top "A" and "V" below aren't kerned at all. You could draw a vertical line straight through the voluminous void between those letters. In contrast, the bottom "AV" is kerned; the bottom right of the "A" slides under the top left of the "V" so they overlap and fill each other's white space a bit.

You can see the impact of kerning in a word like "AVATAR." The top example below has no kerning and there's too much air around the "V" and "T." The middle example has, I think, a nice amount of kerning. One of the loopier reviews I read of James Cameron's "Avatar" movie criticized the poor kerning of its poster font, at bottom. Curiously, the letter that looks most out of whack to me is the "R," which seems to be a light-year away from its "A." I guess when you earn a billion dollars you can kern any way you want.

You build kerning into a digital font by going through every two-letter combination likely to need it and defining how much space you want between them. This is hard--doubly so when your font has two versions of every letter and they're handprinted, which means you can't blindly apply the same kerning to every pair. Keeping in mind that my lower-case letters appear as upper-case, "AV," "Av," "aV," and "av" all require separate adjustments. Then there are the many permutations of VA, AT, TA, LT, LV, PA, etc. As I work with my font I continue to discover new combinations of letters that need work and send me back under the hood to tweak.

So I used my custom digital font in Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow. Here's what happened as a result: If I needed to edit my text, I opened the file in Photoshop and revised it in a few seconds. If I needed to expand or delete it: done in less than a minute. If I needed to prepare my pages for translation into other languages: my letters and word balloons were already on separate Photoshop layers, so all they had to do was delete my text layer with one click and substitute their own.

I'm not saying you should letter digitally. Your needs, skills, priorities, talents, and logorrhea are different than mine. I'm saying that with the type of work I do--say, writing a 200-page graphic novel that'll pass through two or three editors and has the potential for foreign publication--it would be an insane waste of my time not to. There are trade-offs; I think they're worth it.

As I described a couple of weeks ago, I used three main fonts in WHTTWOT, plus a bunch of fonts meant to evoke era-appropriate indicia, ads, signs and such. Most of the book is lettered in my handprinted font because it's a conversation between me and the reader. You and I are talking here. I used a much slicker professional font for the "Space Age Adventures" comic books within the comic book, and a third font that I thought kind of combined the aesthetics of the other two--formal but relaxed, with lower-case letters--for the final chapter, where the threads come together. I put a lot of thought into how lettering could convey meaning in ways the reader wouldn't be consciously aware of. To the extent I succeeded, I was happy with the result. To the extent I fell short, well . . . I know I have a lot to learn.

Oh, final piece of advice. Don't use Comic Sans. Just don't.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Hubble Got'chu!

Jimmy Fallon marks the 20th birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope, possibly the most productive instrument in the history of science since Newton's pen.

It's easy to take Hubble's images for granted, and even easier not to care at all. But the telescope's been a champ, operating years past its design life and hopefully for many more. With the coming retirement of the space shuttle fleet, its days are surely numbered; someday, something will break and we won't have any way to go fix it. Let's treasure it while we can.

I know two things about Hubble most people don't:

1. I once had a parakeet named Hubble, but that was way back before the telescope. I named it for Edwin Hubble, who also gave the scope its name. What can I say, I'm a fan. Mean bird, though.

2. You may recall that Hubble has a flawed primary mirror, a fact not discovered until after it was launched. Corrective optics (basically, a bunch of little curved mirrors) were installed, and the telescope went on to have a stellar (heh) career. The original mirror was manufactured by Perkin-Elmer, which somehow neglected to do simple tests that even an amateur mirror grinder would've used to easily spot the mistake. It was a huge blunder.

When Hubble lifted off, I was working as an inorganic chemist in an environmental lab, where I used Perkin-Elmer instruments (graphite furnaces and an ICP, for those in the know). I remember how proud our Perkin-Elmer service reps were before Hubble's launch, bragging about how they'd made the mirror (though they personally had nothing to do with it), and how abashed they were when its humiliating flaws were found. Of course we spent the next several years giving those poor guys grief about their crummy optics and obviously shoddy workmanship. "Hey, don't put any of those Hubble mirrors in my machine!" I'm sure they got tired of it, but I never did.

Congrats to Hubble and its designers (even Perkin-Elmer), operators, researchers, and owners (hey, that's us taxpayers!) for more than 110,000 orbits completed and many more to come, I hope.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

David Wastes Paper on Me

"David Wasting Paper" is a blog by a self-described geek who asks cartoonists both famous and obscure the same set of questions and then posts their answers. The list of respondents is impressive, including Bill Griffith, Dan Piraro, Rick Geary, Bob Staake, Tom Richmond, Shary Flenniken, Ann Telnaes, and 105 others before he got around to me.

If you want to know whether I have any pre-drawing rituals, what I collect, which animated cartoon character I'd be, or my advice to someone interested in a cartooning career, here you go! Many thanks to David for the fun questions and the opportunity to be Number 113.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Aunt Fritzi is a Fan!

All right, this is one of the Top Five Coolest Things that's ever resulted from my semi-career in comics: cartoonist Guy Gilchrist, who currently does the classic comic strip "Nancy," gave my new book a shout-out in today's strip! In the final panel, Nancy's Aunt Fritzi (who became quite a fox sometime in the past 70 or so years) is reading a book whose title rang a bell:

I met Guy in 2007 when I went back east for the opening of an exhibition of original comic art (including mine) at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. We'd become acquainted online but weren't really pals when I called and asked if Karen and I could drop by his studio/academy in Connecticut. He said sure, we did, he ordered pizzas, and I had a couple of the best, most hospitable hours I've ever experienced as a cartoonist. He's a great storyteller, knows everyone in the business (especially the old guard), and couldn't have been nicer or more generous. I blogged about that visit here. Guy has since left New England to pursue his passion for country music, so I was lucky to catch him when I did.

What Guy couldn't possibly have known is that today is my birthday. I didn't intend to mention it, but when a birthday gift like that turns up, well . . . that's pretty darn cool. Sorry, Karen, I don't see how you're gonna top that. Although I'm sure the cake you spent all evening baking will be delicious.

I've already written to thank him personally, but I'll also do it publicly and add that Guy is one of the good guys. Many thanks to him!

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Bill Griffith's 40 Best Tips

Pal Mike Lynch pointed me toward a blog post by Sherm Cohen that offers "Griffy's Top 40 List on Comics and Their Creation" by "Zippy" creator Bill Griffith (follow all that?). Griffith's list is a nice mix of plainly practical--such as a shopping list of his favorite art supplies or advice on protecting your rights--philosophical, and funny. I like pretty much every point, and he says some things that I've tried to say much better than I did. A few of my favorites:

9. The eyes are the gateway to the cartoon character's soul. Make sure pupil placement is where you need it to be.

10. Cartoon characters have souls.

22. When doing full-page comics, think of each page as a self-contained entity. Also think of each two-page spread as a graphic unit. Compose pages with clear narrative flow in mind, but use "tricks of the trade" to add interest (borderless panels, circular panels, L-shaped panels). use these sparingly and for story-telling effect, not as "eye candy." Never say "eye candy."

23. Comics can tell any kind of story. They're infinitely flexible. Comics will never disappear. New media do not replace existing media. "New" form free up existing forms, allowing them to do more interesting, less commercially driven things.

32. Don't reach out all the way to the reader--don't worry about being "obscure" or ambiguous--if you're sure of what you're doing, ask the reader to meet you halfway.

36. Manga is really great--to make fun of. [Griffith also wrote the same of superheroes and Disney so don't feel persecuted, manga fans.]

39. Don't just look at comics for inspiration and education. Look at great drawing wherever it appears . . .

40. Last but not least: Never listen to anyone else's advice on cartooning.

Good stuff consistent with my approach and experience. If you want to cartoon, check it out.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Comics Coast to Coast Podcast

The hosts of the venerable Comics Coast to Coast podcast--Brian Dunaway, John Sanford, and Justin Thompson--just posted an hour-plus interview with yours truly. We did it last Thursday, right after the 2010 Eisner nominations were announced, so we had that news to talk about, plus much more about my life and work that somebody with 1:07:23 to kill might find interesting.

I really enjoyed our conversation and hope that comes across. I was also fighting off a cold, which is why my voice gets a little croaky toward the end. Talking with these guys felt a little like falling into a radio "Morning Zoo" crew, with laughter and digressions. They're all cartoonists themselves, which I think adds some good texture and energy. We started the interview talking about local bookstores and ended it with renewable power. In between, we spent the first half on Mom's Cancer and the second on WHTTWOT.

Many thanks to the Comics Coast to Coast guys! If you do visit their site, check out the long list of podcasts they've done with other cartooning type people. It's pretty impressive.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

2010 Eisner Award Nominations--Wait, WHAT TH-?

Nominations for the 2010 Eisner Awards (the Oscars of the comics business) were announced this afternoon and, well, it looks like I'm up for two of them. After I just got done posting about how I didn't foresee getting back to the San Diego ComicCon anytime soon, they figured out a way to pull me back in. Brilliant.

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? is nominated in two categories: Best Lettering, and Best Publication Design (with Abrams designer Neil Egan). I heard about this a few days ago but had to keep mum until the announcement. It's a genuine surprise, and I mean that with all the sincerity I can muster. I didn't know I was in the running. This is one of those times when it truly is an honor just to be nominated.

I imagine some people reading the list will get to my name and say, "Huh?" They might even shout it so loudly they startle their neighbor's napping shih-tzu. I sympathize.

I think the Best Publication Design nomination recognizes the work Designer Neil, Editor Charlie Kochman and I did to make WHTTWOT not just the best book we could but a special physical object: the die-cut jacket, the different textures and glosses on the cover treatments, the different types of paper used for the four internal "comic book" inserts. That's the kind of detail Abrams prides itself on and a big reason I'm happy they're my publisher.

Front to back, from placement of page numbers to layout to incidental art and photography, we worked hard to give the book a thoughtful, interesting look that most importantly supported the story. I'm especially happy to see Neil earn this notice; he's a life-long comics fan who put a lot of heart, care and effort into getting WHTTWOT right. To have the results of his work vying for comics' highest award must be pretty sweet icing on the cake.

Lettering is an important aspect of the heart, care and effort that I put into the book. I'm especially surprised by the Best Lettering nomination because I honestly had no idea anyone noticed.

Most of the lettering in WHTTWOT is my own hand-printed font, sampled from the lettering I did for Mom's Cancer. I've never pretended my own lettering is professional-grade but it is very personal, which is why I chose it (and why I think it works) for that purpose. A person's handwriting is intimate. The reader and I are having a conversation. The lettering in the "Space Age Adventures" comic books within WHTTWOT is a very different commercial font deliberately cleaner and slicker, and it gets more sophisticated through the decades. For example, in the earlier comics, emphasis is indicated via bold face; in later years, it's indicated via bold italics. I hoped to suggest--through the lettering as well as the writing, artwork, characterizations, "print quality," etc.--that my pretend "Space Age Adventures" series was published by a small off-brand publisher whose little corps of anonymous creators gradually got better at their craft.

Yet a third font is used in the final chapter: not as classically "comic-booky" as the second (e.g., it employs lower-case letters), meant to suggest a progressive melding of the two earlier fonts and, perhaps, a different reality than the others. Still more fonts were used throughout the book to provide era-appropriate comic book indicia and mock advertisements. I put a lot of thought into how lettering could convey meaning--not just through the words the letters spelled, but the very form of the letters themselves.

At best, I hoped the reader might pick up some of that detail subliminally--good lettering, like good special effects, does it best work unnoticed. I'm not claiming it all worked like I wanted, but I was thinking about it.

I imagine I'll have some more thoughts on the Eisner Awards in weeks to come and will leave it at that for now. What a great, gratifying treat! All my thanks to Abrams and the Eisner judging panel. This acknowledgement means a lot.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

WonderCon 2010

My two girls and I had a great time at WonderCon 2010 in San Francisco yesterday. As I'd hoped, it was a smaller, more humane version of the big San Diego ComicCon International, which as I wrote a few posts ago is run by the same group but has gotten so big, difficult and expensive that I'm not sure when I'll be going again. WonderCon proved to be a nicely scaled nearby alternative, definitely scratching my comics convention itch and providing the types of nice moments I've often found at its big brother.

It rained in San Francisco Friday, which was the only damper in driving, parking and getting through the front door of the Moscone Center. Can't blame the Con for the weather. The venue had plenty of space for the event, which to my eye took up maybe one-third to one-half the floorspace of the San Diego ComicCon--which still made it plenty big.

Big Enough.

My girls are more interested in manga and anime, while I'd rather prowl the aisles ogling old comic books and original art, but there was enough of both to keep us all happy. My only small complaint concerned the programming of speakers and panels and such. One, they were hard to find, set in conference rooms on a mezzanine accessed by escalators tucked into distant corners. I think that alone kept the audiences smaller than I expected to find when I poked my head into a couple. Two, there was nothing I really needed to see. Some of that's my fault, some a function of it being a Friday with the good stuff saved for the weekend. That's really less a gripe than a note. Otherwise, no complaints at all.

Two of the first people I ran into were Richard and Wendy Pini, the husband and wife team that created the pioneering "ElfQuest" series and continues to do great work. Richard and I began corresponding after he read Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow and loved it. I don't mean to brag, but he's a fan. OK, I'm bragging a little. Anyway, I'd never met Richard in person, he had no idea I'd be there, and we had a really nice "reunion." They're terrifically kind and talented people I was proud to introduce to my kids.

The Pinis humor a geek.

So I'm standing there talking with Richard and Wendy when a man walks up and greets them as old friends. He looks familiar; I glance at his name tag: David Gerrold, science-fiction author and writer of the Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." I begged a quick introduction from Richard and scored several Cool Dad Points when I was able to introduce Laura and Robin to the man who wrote their favorite Trek episode (because I raised them right). I'd read a couple of his books and so was able, for the first time in my life, to have an intelligent conversation with a creative-person-I-unexpectedly-met about his work (those types of meetings don't always go well for me).

David Gerrold. Cool beans.

The nice coda to the Gerrold story is that later, when my girls and I split up to do our own things, Robin and Laura were at a table shopping for tribbles when they looked up to see Gerrold talking with the vendor. (And I have to wonder what that would be like for him, to see critters he created 43 years ago for sale at a con . . .) Anyway, Gerrold recognized my girls, nodded to the shopkeeper and said, "Take care of these two. They're friends of mine." Which, you know, is pretty all right.

I was able to reconnect with a bunch of cartoonist-types I'd met before, including Shaenon Garrity ("Narbonic") and her husband Andrew Farago, who curates the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum, Justin Thompson ("Mythtickle"), and Alexis Fajardo ("Kid Beowulf"). The latter two have new books out I was happy to pick up.

WonderCon also drew a nice mix of TV and movie celebrities. The Bionic Woman (Lindsay Wagner) sat next to Supergirl (Helen Slater). Funny moment: shortly after arriving, we saw Lou Ferigno (TV's "Hulk") sitting at a table. This is not remarkable. Mr. Ferigno has had a table at every comic-book-type event I've ever been to. You can't toss a light saber at a con without hitting Lou Ferigno. So I'm explaining this to my girls and then start to say, "I'm just surprised we haven't stumbled across Peter Mayhew yet," because if anyone's more ubiquitous at comics conventions than Ferigno, it's the tall Brit who played Chewbacca. And just as I'm saying it, right across the row from Ferigno, we see . . . Mayhew. That's what passes for hilarity inside my head.

I didn't meet Mr. Ferigno or Mr. Mayhew yesterday. Here's the deal with celebrities at cons: they're there to make money. I'm sure they genuinely enjoy meeting fans as well, but I don't think they'd appear if there weren't people willing to pay $20 or more for an autograph or photo. Thing is, I don't want their autographs or photos. What would I do with them? When I see someone whose work I've genuinely enjoyed, what I'd rather do is tell them that, say something nice and hopefully knowledgeable about their career, shake their hand, and thank them for being there. That moment means more to me than a signature pushed across a table. On the other hand, I understand and respect the fact that they're not making a dime from it, so I try to make sure I don't take up too much time or chase off paying customers. You'd be surprised how often you can catch a semi-famous person sitting at a table alone.

So I was delighted yesterday to have such moments with actors Erin Gray ("Buck Rogers"), Malachi Throne ("Star Trek" and a ton of stuff in the '60s and '70s), and Lee Meriwether (ditto). I also got to meet comic book writer Steve Englehart, who wrote some of my favorite comics when I was a kid.

Erin Gray, then and nowish (I didn't take the photo on the right, but that's about how she looked yesterday. Which there was nothing wrong with.)

Bought some books, met some people, made some friends. To me, that's a successful convention and a really nice day. I expect I'll be a WonderCon regular.