Wide gaps and/or letters slamming together erratically was a regular event. (And many things that annoyed me about Illustrator back then continue to annoy me in recent CS versions.) The biggest pain at the time was that programs (or the system) didn’t completely respect kerning pairs generated out of Fontographer. At the time that program made more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator. Once the font was made I used FreeHand to do the lettering. Willie’s font, first used on LONE WOLF AND CUB #31, Jan. Roxanne continues to live and work in the Atlanta area, and is still involved with Bob Burden’s comics projects. The first comic where I was truly happy with my computer lettering was in FORBIDDEN PLANET in 1992. He wanted me to create an Artie Simek font to be used in the Image project, “1963.” I always formed my letters from scratch and made them look KINDA like another letterer’s hand. The next request for generating a new font came from Alan himself. Al had just taken over the art duties from Bill Sienkiewicz on Alan Moore’s ill-fated BIG NUMBERS project. He wanted me to create a font imitating Al Columbia’s hand. Another offer of computer lettering work came from Paul Jenkins, who was then an editor at Tundra Publishing. #Programs like typestyler for pc series#Vickie Williams was a regular letterer at Innovation, but couldn’t fit the series into her schedule, so David asked me to create a font imitating Vickie’s hand. Shortly after my computer lettering hit the stands in FLAMING CARROT, I was contacted by David Campiti at Innovation Comics to letter an upcoming FORBIDDEN PLANET series being painted by Daerick Gross. At that time he began developing a writing career that continues today, with many projects relating to comics. In other words, the rest of the process remained unchanged from methods worked out in the middle of the 20th century.ĭavid lettered comics for several companies, including DC, but in 1989 he joined the staff of Disney Comics as an assistant editor. The art would be photographed in “flats,” usually four pages per flat, colored by hand separations following color guides (unless the comic was black and white as with GREY), assembled into signatures with eight pages on each side, made into printing plates, printed on high-speed offset presses, folded, assembled and trimmed. Note that, while the font and lettering were done on computer, the lettering still needed to be printed out and pasted onto the art, which was then handled like any comics art at the time, a method that continued for some years. Lastly, go over the work with a pen in one hand and Wite-Out in the other. More (real) cut and paste for the SFX or newspaper copy. An X-Acto knife cut later and I’d paste down the individual balloons in their proper places. I’d print that on sticky-back paper at 300 dpi on my own LaserWriter or take it to the service bureau for 600 or 1200 dpi prints. This I filled with all the grouped balloons with as little space between them as possible. When I finished a page I’d cut and paste all that work into a second document. #Programs like typestyler for pc software#Next I’d do the SFX either in Canvas or in a great pioneering piece of software called Typestyler (which I beta-tested). Then I did balloons and pointers with the vector tools. I’d position the cursor and type the copy. Example of on-screen digital lettering on a layer above grayed-down line art, lettering by Todd Klein on DEATHBLOW, 1996.
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