#1: Hello / What Do Letterers Do?
Hi everybody! For this newsletter’s first post, I thought I’d set the tone of this series and get y'all ready for what's to come.
Many of the folks reading this know this, but I’ve lettered manga for a long time. It started as a way for me to pay rent in college, and it grew into a career where I’ve crossed paths with some of the most passionate, thoughtful, and kind folks imaginable. Localizing comics is a labor of love, and it attracts some amazing creatives who care very deeply about their work. These people have helped shape localization into what it is today.
The manga localization industry often feels like an amorphous blob that's constantly changing with the tide of the economy and technology, and it would take more than a newsletter to explain its whole history. Instead, I'll break it into parts. Translation. Editing. Lettering. First we'll start with lettering.
Lettering is complicated. Letterers get the script and art from the editor of the project, and they’re instructed to marry the two. How do letterers know what to do? How do they know which fonts to use? How do they know whether to subtitle or replace a sound effect? How do they know what bits to retouch, and what bits to leave alone?
For the most part, manga letterers follow a style guide from the publisher. Compare two books from the same publisher, and the “house style” will start to pop out.
Below are two pages from two different series with two different letterers, but both from Yen Press. The fonts, leading, and sound effect treatment are identical. This is Yen's house style.
Below are two pages from two different series with two different letterers, but both from VIZ Media. The sound effects are fully replaced, and there are some editorial/grammatical consistencies. However, they are stylistically very different:
Some publishers have very strict style guides, and some are very lax. With a strict style guide, letterers are allowed to make very few decisions. With a lax style guide, letterers have a whole lot of creative agency. I’ll be examining both cases in this series, because they have an interesting history.
I’ll be focusing on lettering pretty heavily, because it's very important to me. If you’d like a crash course in manga lettering, I gave a presentation last year that you might want to check out: Manga Lettering - Translating What Cant Be Spoken.pdf
If you’ve made it this far, you’re gonna like what I have in store for y’all later this month.
Thanks for reading!
- Sara
she/her
letterer/developer/font-designer
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