Comic lettering

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Novil
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Comic lettering

Post by Novil »

An interesting article about the lettering of comic strips by the professionals from Blambot comic fonts. (Sandra and Woo uses their font Anime Ace 2.0 BB, by the way.)

You certainly won’t believe how much time it takes to letter the “Sandra and Woo” strips. Urgh. :|
pepsi 500
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Re: Comic lettering

Post by pepsi 500 »

wow, interesting stuff,i've wondered how long the tails on the speech bubbles should be, now i know haha.
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Re: Comic lettering

Post by t_catt11 »

This is an excellent article, thanks for the link!

BTW, Blambot is a fantastic site in general.
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Arborean
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Re: Comic lettering

Post by Arborean »

I must say, I usually don't notice lettering at all. I always thought when people say lettering, they mean the actual letters, but this article seems to be focused on word baloon formats. So when people say lettering, they mean the baloons?

As for text, don't people just use a simple font and type the words? If this is a comic faux pas, please let me know.
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Novil
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Re: Comic lettering

Post by Novil »

Arborean wrote:I must say, I usually don't notice lettering at all. I always thought when people say lettering, they mean the actual letters, but this article seems to be focused on word baloon formats. So when people say lettering, they mean the baloons?
Lettering: Placement of the word bubbles inside the panels, how they look like (oval or freestyle, for example) and the font that is used for the text.

Usually a comic readers only notices the lettering if it’s done badly.
Arborean wrote:As for text, don't people just use a simple font and type the words? If this is a comic faux pas, please let me know.
We use Blambots comic font “Anime Ace 2.0 BB”. I tried several dozen comic fonts at the beginning and chose that one. Using something like “Arial” would look quite bad. Other cartoonists don’t use a computer font but write the text by hand. Since Sandra and Woo gets published in English and German using a computer font instead of hand-lettering was a natural choice.
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Arborean
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Re: Comic lettering

Post by Arborean »

Novil wrote: Usually a comic readers only notices the lettering if it’s done badly.
Very true! Just like backgrounds; you don't really notice them when they are good, but you notice if they are missing.
Novil wrote:We use Blambots comic font “Anime Ace 2.0 BB”. I tried several dozen comic fonts at the beginning and chose that one.
Looks really nice to me. It passed the "I didn't notice it" test ;) . It does look like the font they use in print manga.
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