5 Common Webcomics Lettering Mistakes
I randomly link-hopped to a variety of webcomics over the weekend, curious to see what was out there.
I saw that Sturgeonâs Law is still in effect. Â If anything, itâs low-balling it.
I also saw a few mistakes where a quick fix would make a lot of webcomics look a whole lot better.  So, in my attempt to be constructive, Iâll point out a few of the flaws. The old saw about how the reader shouldnât see the lettering is violated in every one of these problems.  And not in the good way. Â
These mistakes stick out like sore thumbs to me:
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1. Using a Standard Operating System Font
I saw more than a few webcomics that were using Arial or Verdana or some other standard system font thatâs better used in writing letters or setting type on a website.
Donât do that. Â Use a font thatâs designed for comics. Â Blambot has a few free ones. Â Comicraft has some great ones that youâll have to pay for. Â There are other random free fonts out there, too, to use. Â All of them would be better than Calibri Light or Helvetica Neue.Â
Now that Iâve said that, if possible try not to use the free fonts.  Everyone else is using them.  And most of the people using them are making bad webcomics that you donât want to be associated with.  You want your webcomic to stick out, to look less common, right?  Donât use a common font, if you can help it.  (Hint: Take advantage of Comicraftâs sale on New Yearâs Day.)
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2. Balloons Overlapping Borders
Sometimes, you either need to move the balloons or shrink your art or change your dialogue. Â Having balloons randomly overlapping panels by this little bit drives me nuts.
The fix is really easy. Â Donât let the words or the balloon appear outside the panel border. Â In the cases you see here, the words arenât so close to the edge of the balloon that the artist couldnât have just let the border lay over top of the balloon and cut it off before it went outside. Â If thatâs the case, cut off the edge of that balloon.
In cases like that, I also like the technique of connecting the balloon to the border and eliminating the border where the two intersect. Â Hereâs my solution:
I mocked this up in a minute by just painting a white line over the edge of the balloon and the panel border in a new layer above them both. Â If I were being very picky, Iâd probably also push the two balloons in that second panel together rather than using the connector between them.
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3. Dialogue Appearing Off-Center Inside the Balloon
We all know how important it is to create your dialogue in a diamond shape so it fits best inside the oval of your balloon, right? Â Thatâs the hard part.
The easy part is to center the text inside the balloon.  This might be the easiest fix of them all.  Just move that block of text around to leave the same amount of white space all around the words. Give it some time before giving it a final proofread and I bet youâd find it somewhere.  I have to think this mistake is usually made because the letterer is just going too fast and doesnât look twice.  (Or that they shifted the text layer accidentally at some point, but thatâs a bit of a reach. Iâm trying to give the benefit of the doubt here somehowâŠ)
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4. Tails are Too Wide or Too Narrow
This is tough to explain. Â Itâs a judgment call. Â Thereâs no formula. But â
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â that looks awful. (The balloon thickness problem in the right panel is my mistake in the creation of this image, not the original comicsâ.)
Just try to make the tail of your balloon be a consistent width where it joins up with the balloon from panel to panel. And make it a proportion that looks good. Â I saw a lot of really fat tails that look like weird stubs. Â I have to think thatâs because the user isnât familiar with the tools theyâre using. Â They donât see these wide tails anywhere in their other comics, do they? Â Or, worse, is this the cargo cult case where so many webcomics artists before them have done it so badly that they think itâs what theyâre supposed to do now? Â
Iâm horrified just thinking about it.
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5. Â Tucking a Tail Behind Another Balloon. Â And Crossing the Streams.
It can be tough to fit in a lot of balloons in a single panel, particularly when two people are going back and forth.Â
Do what you have to do to move the balloons around so the tail doesnât need to slide under another balloon like this.
For further research, study pages filled with conversation.  Watch how the balloon tails snake around, and the way the balloons stack up to keep everything steady. Iâd recommend Chris Eliopoulosâ lettering on âUltimate Spider-Man,â which had lots of these back-and-forth conversations, or Tom Orzechowskiâs work on âX-Menâ, which was just jam packed with dialogue.  To see someone who knew how and when to butt a balloon up against a border, study John Workmanâs lettering, perhaps in Walter Simonsonâs âThorâ work.
None of these are examples Iâm making up. Â In three of the cases, I lifted exact panels from webcomics I saw and then went to work removing everything except the balloons and tails. The struggle is real.
The good news, four out of five of these issues are very easily solved. That last example is a little trickier and will take some practice and experimentation to get right.
I love this! Youâve listed handy sites before where a person can learn about coloring and penciling â do you have any suggestions for a site where one can learn about how to letter?
I wish I could. I donât think there is one. Obviously, read Todd Kleinâs blog. And Nate Piekos occasionally posts stuff to social media, but thereâs not one good site that I know of off the top of my head. You just need the Comicraft book and the DC Guide to Comics and Lettering and youâre done. Thatâs all you get. The Digital Webbing Lettering board was a hot spot for letterers a decade ago, but I think thatâs empty now. The archives might prove interesting, and a lot of todayâs letterers came up from there, too.
Donât go giving me new ideas for new websites to start now! heh
Rule # 5 is one Iâve known about for years for whatever reason. Iâm therefore endlessly interested by the fact that regular (very regular) 2000ad letterer Ellie De Ville breaks this rule on an frequent basis AND makes its work.
Just goes to show all rules are there to be broken.
Mind ask UK letterer extraordinaire Jim Campbell of the most important rules and youâll get a quick lesson in the rights and wrongs of a crossbar I (capital i that is).
Colin â Yeah, thereâs always a choice between âbadâ lettering and style. Sometimes, it can work. I left out the whole disclaimer that I probably should have kept in there that any of these âmistakesâ can be ignored under the right circumstances. But all of the examples I saw were more âmistakesâ than âstyle.â đ
Yes, the crossbar-I is a thing of pure madness. Amazingly, I didnât see too many problems with that one when I looked at those dozens of webcomics. It might be partial blindness from all the extremely bad font choices I saw otherwise, though.
Iâm not sure I agree with point 2. I quite like those balloons sticking out of the box.
The lettering mistake I hate (and I still see in professional comics) is having one balloon above and to the right of another balloon so you donât know what order to read them in. I regularly make the wrong guess in these situations.
Iâll have to agree. sometimes I feel that itâs fine to have word balloons stick out of a panel, and may even help with some transitions.
Yes, if the balloon is sticking out of the panel to guide the eye to the next panel â commonly when you need an obvious clue to read down instead of across â I think it can work. When itâs an example like this one, though, and the balloon is just sloppily poking out for no reason, I donât like it.
But, if it works for you, I wonât try to argue with you into hating something. Life is too short. đ