The Lettering List 001 - A Hazy Wave
Hello!
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Hass' Lettering List, where I send you a list of lettering things. That's it! That's all we're doing here, with the caveat that I'll write a small bit about one of them, and then you won't hear from me again for a few weeks. Deal?
The first list are all things I've been working on from the past month, snippets of things I saved because I liked, because they were silly, stupid, funny, annoying, whatever. Unlike the stuff I share on social media, here I'll (mostly) leave the original dialogue in the balloons, but I suppose it comes with a warning that there's a small chance it may suggest a story beat to you if it is from a comic you're reading. The chances of that are not at all high, but there's the warning just in case.
Anyway, onto the Lettering List: 
And to wrap it up: 
I wanted to write a little about this final one, just because what you're seeing here is unfinished, technically. (I'll share the "finished" version in a later newsletter.) In an ideal world, a letterer will work over the final colours. That's something I always try and do for initial styles and first issues at least, just to get a sense of what a finished comic is going to look like before you make any "artistic" decisions on the lettering style. It's not always possible with deadlines to keep that going, but at least knowing what something will look like is helpful for lettering and sound effects, getting the right palette choices, knowing if there might be a lot of colour holds on a book (where a colourist will colour the ink lines), whatever.
Comics is a medium where you're all layering stuff on top of someone else's work but trying to blend it in a way so that it never becomes obvious that that's what is happening. The artist is interpreting a script but in a way to remove authorship, in essence, by making everything feel "whole" (rather than fighting against the writing). The colourist takes the inks and adds to them in a way that makes you think it was all done by one hand, and ideally the letterer does that, too, making decisions that feel in harmony with the rest of the comic. (Not "invisible" -- maybe there's more to write on that later.) I write all this as a set-up for the above image, because sometimes you get to blend those roles even more. In this example, taken from a collaboration with writer/artist Ibrahim Moustafa and colourist Brad Anderson, I am drawing sound effects directly onto the art files, before they are sent through to Brad to colour. This is rare! I've only ever gotten to do it with this same team on a previous book (RetroActive, published by Humanoids), but it was a really interesting process. You're inserting your work into an earlier stage, which means that some of the considerations you're making are really quite different. Normally for an SFX you have to think colour, maybe even effects (should it be blurred based on what the colourist did?), but when you're drawing it directly onto the art, I'm mostly trying to recreate the quality of the line artist, so that I'm completely lost in that layer of the work. Then Brad (who is fantastic - we have worked together on a few things and he has a great knack for reimagining himself in each project) will treat my work exactly the same as the rest of the line art, and my contribution to the sound effects of the book will be lost in a hazy wave of authorship. Perfect!
It's that same mentality - what would the artist do? (WWTAD? coming on t-shirts soon) - that I try to bring to most decisions made. Sometimes that means trying to understand the artist a little, like what styles do they like, how have they lettered their own work, what does that mean about what they're trying to achieve with lettering. And sometimes it means, within the scope of the style and genre of the book, what would a cartoonist do to change this? There's lots to write about that idea, so, hopefully stick around for the next instalment of the Lettering List and we might get stuck into that then.
If you made it this far through the words, thanks for reading, and let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see in the Lettering List.
Hass
Comics featured in the Lettering List this edition:
[Unnanounced project], Tales of the Titans, The Sickness, Harley Quinn, Time Before Time, Batman Beyond, Drive Like Hell, [Unnanounced Project]
Sneaky plug for my upcoming graphic novel, THE UNLIKELY STORY OF FELIX & MACABBER - created with Juni Ba. It's available to pre-order now here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unlikely-Story-Felix-Macabber/dp/1506738222