Considerations when Lettering for Comics
An Interview with Lettering Artist Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What does an artist consider in the lettering of a comic book? TypeThursday founder Thomas Jockin spoke with Hassan to understand why the role exists, what consideration you should consider if you are making your own comic and the importance of community.
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Thomas Jockin: Hassan, thank you so much for taking time to chat with TypeThursday.
Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou: Haha not a problem, excited to talk text.
TJ: Likewise! I know you love to talk about comics and how letterforms are used. There’s the Youtube series Strip Panel Naked, the magazine you edit Panel x Panel, and the Podcast Letters and Lines. Before we get into all those details, I’m super curious to find out how you got into comics and especially lettering for comics. Could you share with us some information?
Hassan’s Start in Comics
HOE: So getting into comics was just through being a kid, I guess. I remember my friend Tom was really into comics when we were around 13 or 14? I guess, for clarification, I’m talking the US mainstream superhero kind of comics. Everyone in England had read Beano and Dandy when they were kids! But my friend Tom had this Essential Spider-Man volume, which was this huge black and white reprint of the early Stan Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories. I’d never quite seen anything like it, and devoured hundreds of pages of this thing really quick, and then I guess I was hooked? Spider-Man was this geeky kid, and I’d guess 99% of people into comics could relate to that in some way!
Concerning lettering for comics, it was purely a practical reason initially. I was putting some pitches together for comics I’d written, and was needing a letterer. A writer friend of mine who’d met me through doing Strip Panel Naked said I should give it a go, thought I’d have the sensibilities for it. So I started playing around and got hooked! From there it just snowballed into lettering for other people and then became a pretty big part of my work, somehow!
TJ: Thank you for sharing. Truth be told, I’ve never heard of Beano and Dandy! But I definitely relate to as well to Spider-Man. I found that really interesting your journey into lettering started with the Strip Panel Naked series, and then you started working on your own work. How many episodes were you into the series before your friend encouraged you to go at it yourself?
HOE: I think it was quite a few months in. I remember putting the pitch together at the end of 2016, and I started the series in June of that year, so yeah, quite a while! As for Beano and Dandy, they’re great! Dandy stopped publication a few years ago, but Beano carries on. They’re these very British kids comics, I think published weekly. Just silly little fun comics. I still have a few Beano annual knocking about my house actually… But back to the question! I think my friend (I’ll name him, Deniz Camp, writer of a really good comic called Maxwell’s Demons) just guessed it might be the sort of thing I could get myself lost in. Lettering comics is a really weird and unique experience I think. It’s sort of design but functionality, a bit of doing something to contribute very visibly to the page but also sometimes knowing when to seep into the artwork. It’s just odd, and I don’t think there’s much else like it.
I try to work to make the lettering and the speech balloons and captions and everything else match the work that is on the page.
Considerations When Lettering for Comics
TJ: I would agree about lettering comics after listening to your podcast, Letters and Lines. From episode 1, I recall you and your co-host speaking about the considerations like position, matching the line, texture. I could tell you had specific meanings behind those ideas. Could you clarify what kind of considerations you make when lettering a comic?
w: Deniz Camp, a: Adam du Shole
HOE: I learned so much from Aditya, who is the co-host of the podcast. As an aside, I think comics as a community or industry or whatever term you’d want to give it is full of really great people who are happy to share and discuss ideas, and that’s how I ended up chatting with Aditya before doing the podcast. Anyway, my personal view on it, which I think we cover at length on that first episode of Letters and Lines, is that I want everything blended on the page. My own background is with filmmaking, and my view on that was always to have everything come together to be sort of imperceptible. The sound of a film shouldn’t be noticeable in its construction, but of course may need to be noticeable in its execution. Like in a horror film, you don’t want to be aware that there is say, badly recorded violins playing loudly, but you still need those violins to be loud and noticeable so that the audience gets some fear in them. Does that make sense? There’s a fine line between being intentionally noticeable and just badly noticeable. So I try to work to make the lettering and the speech balloons and captions and everything else match the work that is on the page. A big part of that, for me, is about matching the font and letterforms and the stroke of the balloon to the artwork itself. Comics are almost exclusively digitally lettered (in the mainstream), but I want to give the sense that maybe it as the artist that lettered them. You’re never going to quite get it perfect, but for me I want to get close as possible. There are also considerations around placement for flow, and beats, and all that. But I suppose my first consideration is always look and style
[T]here’s always going to be a loss of legibility,…But we’ve also got a much more savvy readership who is used to reading comics that are lettered in this way.
Legibility in Comic Fonts
TJ: I also recall from episode one you spoke briefly about the importance of legibility of fonts. I imagine that is relevant for captions or areas where the text gets small. If I recall from the discussion, it was related to the tension to the type being too decorative versus being efficient. Is that a fair summary of that consideration or is there more we should know?
w: Barry Keegan, a: Barry Keegan, Chris O’Halloran
HOE: Ooh yeah. This is an excellent question, and I think it ties in nicely with the previous question and answer, too. So, originally comics were all hand-lettered, which included drawing the panel borders, speech balloons, thought balloons, etc etc. Literally y’know, pen on paper, hand-lettering. So when everything switched to digital the feel of that could be lost without the right fonts. Which is why all the comics you’ll see now have these handwriting-style fonts, which I guess began as a throwback to the look and feel of those older fonts. My take on it would be to refer back to that previous question and answer, which is about matching up fonts to the linework of the artist who is drawing the comic. I think there’s always going to be a loss of legibility, because to me a handwriting style font is always going to less legible than something like Arial (to varying degrees — obviously not saying that the fonts we use in comics are illegible). But we’ve also got a much more savvy readership who is used to reading comics that are lettered in this way, so maybe we get away with it. But it’s all about purpose, ultimately. Font in comics is about storytelling just as much as anything else, and to be part of that storytelling is the idea of the artist having lettered it, too. I don’t know that this is a good answer to the question, but have I steered it enough in the right direction?! Haha
Why Are the Roles in Comics Separated?
TJ: Ha! You did a fine job with that answer. I get the sense the workflow for comics is inherently collaborative. Yet, in an ideal state, the original artist would make both the artwork and the lettering. Therefore, there’s a tension here. Why do you believe this separation has occurred?
HOE: So that’s always a very blanket statement, but there’s a tonne of variables in it. In that first episode of Letters and Lines, Aditya and I mentioned this idea of an artist being the ideal person to letter their own work, but I think it was Aditya that said he believes he’d do a better job concerning lettering placement than most of the artists he works with. And I think there’s a very valid thought in that. For an artist lettering their own work, a lot of that comes from the idea of their own pen and line creating the words and the balloons and the sound effects, and with that comes a very complete or together feel to the whole thing, to me. If you look at Moebius’ original pages and lettering, it all blends beautifully together in a way that would be impossible if someone else had done it. For example, in his translated work, you lose that. So there’s a bit of back and forth and up and down with it. The more you do of anything, the more experience you get, and most artists haven’t had to letter their own work, so their experience of doing it is limited. With that you might not have the best grasp of placement in particular, quite where to place balloons for optimum effect. Again, all variables. There are plenty of artists that are amazing at the whole process!
Concerning why that separation occurred, that’s an easy one: because it’s comics! Comics is all about deadlines in the mainstream model. You’ve got a month to draw an issue, which for most artists is just enough time to do that. But then you’ve also got to colour it, and you’ve got to letter it. So these things got put on a production line, necessarily. So as soon as the artist finished that issue, they move onto the next one, while the colourist and letterer then take over and do their respective jobs. But as I say, because of that you end up with people who are particularly adept at each of those things!
Having a sense of community when everyone is in their own offices alone is pretty important just for keeping yourself healthy, mentally.
The Importance of Community
TJ: Makes perfect sense that deadlines would demand the need to specialize labour. You spoke earlier about the importance of the community. Is that what motivated you to create the podcast with Aditya, in addition to, your other platforms?
HOE: Yeah community is a big thing. I have been chatting to Aditya for a while now, a year or so? He’s a very smart dude, and I got him to do some episodes of Strip Panel Naked with me, and I had a blast speaking to him for that. I got to meet him at a comic convention last year finally, too, and we seemed to have pretty similar sensibilities. But also just practically, if you’re at home working alone every day it does get pretty lonely, and having a regular thing every week (as much as we manage to schedule it every week) is just a lot of fun. I can’t speak for Aditya’s side (he has to talk to me every week, it can’t be that much fun for him!) but it’s just a good excuse to basically hang out with someone in a completely different part of the world for a few hours and shoot the breeze. That’s maybe not quite the answer that’s most directly linked to our work, but I think having a sense of community when everyone is in their own offices alone is pretty important just for keeping yourself healthy, mentally.
TJ: That is a perfectly legitimate answer. Having the chance to speak with like-minded people over the internet can have surprising effects. If it weren’t for Deniz Camp’s encouragement, it would seem like you wouldn’t be a letterer yourself!
HOE: Don’t give him any credit! I’ll never hear the end of it! But absolutely. As I was saying about the comics community, I think it can be a really friendly and inviting place from creators because they’re all kind of in the same boat, as a lot of freelancers are.
Learn more about Hassan’s work
TJ: Absolutely. Hassan, thank you so much for this conversation. Where can people check out your work and everything else you do?
HOE: So the series I do on comics storytelling is at StripPanelNaked. There’s some episodes specifically on lettering that might be interesting! For the podcast with Aditya, you can find it on iTunes, Soundcloud and probably plenty of other places. It’s called Letters & Lines and should be pretty easily searchable. I also make a monthly magazine about the craft of comics, that has featured letterers discussing their work, called PanelxPanel — and to talk about my lettering work, I’ve got a new series out on June 20th called Shanghai Red, with a brilliant writer Christopher Sebela, and an incredible artist, Josh Hixson. Beyond that, I’ve got a few series coming out later in the year that I’m lettering, but everything can be found and kept up to date with via my twitter, @HassanOE!
Yeesh! I try and keep busy…!
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