Appreciating Tom Orzechowski (Part 3)

September 1st is Letterer Appreciation Day, celebrated on Gaspar Saladino’s birthday. To help celebrate it this year, I wanted to bring this bit of writing back, in praise of a master letterer’s unequaled contribution to a fondly remembered comics run.

Yes, we’re talking about Chris Claremont’s “Uncanny X-Men” and Tom Orzechowski’s contributions to it.

This is the third part of an unintended series devoted to Orzechowski’s X-Men lettering.

Here are the first two parts from previous Letterer Appreciation Days:

Happy Letterer Appreciation Day!

Appreciating Tom Orzechowski’s Lettering Choices (Part 2)

Originally published in January 2012 at CBR, the following article has been heavily edited, updated, and improved. It also includes far fewer ads and better formatting.

“The Uncanny X-Men” #244

The story is set during the X-Men’s stay in Australia, living a ramshackle life of hiding, travelling around the globe thanks to the Aborigine, Gateway, whose whip-thingy (“bullroarer”) could transport the mutants anywhere he wanted.

This issue also focuses on the women of the team, which is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Instead of a baseball game or a Danger Room sequence, Storm, Dazzler, still-British Psylocke, and Rogue go shopping at the same mall Jubilee is living out of. This happens only after a dramatic action sequence that exposes some more of Rogue’s character, as well as everyone’s powers, along the way.

Marc Silvestri is the artist, with Dan Green handling the inks, as usual for the time. If you like this period of Silvestri’s work, you’ll likely enjoy this issue. It’s fun to watch him draw the fashions of the late-80s, including Storm’s new haircut and Rogue’s new dress.

It’s all stuff that seemed so modern and “hip” back when the issue came out, but that now looks dated. That’s OK, though. I like a mini-time capsule in a comic.

Lessons Learned

I realized two things while reading that story:

First, Chris Claremont’s writing style is unique and I miss what he had going with the mutant books back then, even if it would be unsustainable today.

Second, Claremont and Tom Orzechowski used lettering in a way to tell the story beyond just dryly reciting the dialogue.

Is the writing in this single issue of “The Uncanny X-Men” overdone? Perhaps. There’s certainly a lot of it. But you know what? For an issue I likely haven’t read in a decade, I never once felt lost in reading it.

Claremont’s dialogue explains everything going on in the issue, from character names and powers to their locations and current situations. Today’s more “economical” writing style is done for collected editions, assuming people will know everything that’s come before because it’s under the same set of covers.

Mostly.

Claremont’s story is also never boring. It uses the comics format to its advantage. It doesn’t draw anything out. If there’s a character dispute that he wanted to highlight for an issue, he had them fight it out, literally. A conversation afterwards works to straighten things out to let the dust settle, but then it’s on to the next big event.

There are two or three such beats in this one issue, where today’s comics are lucky to fit in one complete beat. Comics today, taken as single issues, fit into one of three camps: Setting things up for later events, middle issue slowdown, or rushed ending to wrap everything up so all of these five or six issues can be reprinted together.

Claremont did all of that in this one issue, minus any thought of making a boring section.

Then, Tom Orzechowski Steps In…

The secret weapon in the issue, as it was in most of Claremont’s run, is the lettering of Tom Orzechowski.

I’d love to see the original scripts to these issues, because I’d be curious to see how much of it is contributed by Orzechowski and how much is detailed in the script. Maybe Columbia University’s collection of Claremont’s papers will be able to tell us someday.

Let’s look at some examples:

It’s such a simple thing that you might not have consciously noticed it, but check out that first word balloon. It’s cut-off, including in the middle of the words that fill it. It’s a technical no-no, usually, that’s used here to help tell the story.

Jubilee is running from the mall cops in a frantic rush. She’s babbling as she goes, and we’re looking in at only a small slice of that moment. Orzechowski cuts off that first balloon and it gives the reader a better sense of looking in on a scene that’s already in progress.

Then look at what he does with the last balloon. His hand lettering goes to all lower case, and shrinks in size in the word balloon. This is to indicate a softer voice, almost like Jubilee is now mumbling to herself, rather than calling out to everyone in the area.

It’s a bit of a character moment, showing a bit of her language choices, as well as her attitude while on the run. She’s playful, in a way, but not tossing off one-liners like Spider-Man.

Claremont did this bit a lot, using lots of little word balloons to carry the dialogue. It helps pick up the pace for the reader. It’s not as extreme as some of the captioning work Frank Miller fell into after “Dark Knight Returns” and with “Sin City,” in particular. Miller loved two word captions.

Claremont uses the staccato dialogue to give the reader a sense of something frantic happening, not of a disjointed barely literate character’s psyche at work.

People make fun of the repeated bits of Claremont dialogue that became cliche. (“I’m the best at what I do.” “The sum totality of my psychic powers.” etc.) That served two purposes, though. First, it brought new readers up to speed with pithy and succinct descriptions. Second, it became a rallying cry to long-term readers.

It’s like listening to your favorite album and singing along with your favorite parts. Hearing Psylocke describe her psychic blade is like that point in R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” where everyone screams “Leonard Bernstein!” It’s the familiar comfort of a memorable turn of phrase at an interesting moment.

It’s no different from Captain America screaming “Avengers Assemble!”, which was the biggest applause line in the last Avengers movie.

But looking at the overall pages of a Chris Claremont-penned comic at the time, you can see a wonderful bouncy energy about the word balloons. Yes, there are pages that are text heavy, but for the most part the balloons bounce across the page. They’re small, they direct dialogue back and forth quickly, and they have enough differentiation to keep from being repetitive.

Check out the second panel here, where (off-panel) Jubilee’s growing fear is mirrored in her word balloon sizes. You can feel her voice getting louder by seeing the text on the page transform over four balloons. One word, then three words, then four words, then three big words. It’s a wonderful meter to read a comic in.

In this panel, we see Marc Silvestri drawing a mall cop who looks like he’s jumping straight out of some silent movie comedy, holding onto his hat as his feet leave the floor, smoke indicating where he took off from.

But check out the balloon there with the extra red border to it. Again, it’s rising tension, as the cop repeats himself, each time getting a bit louder. The first time, it’s in a plain font. The second time, Orzechowski bolds the key word, “hate.” On the third time, “hate” is not just bolded, but double or tripled in size, along with the rest of the sentence.

The lettering size mirrors the energy with which the words are spoken. The “hidden” art form of lettering goes out of its way to help tell the story, not just stay out of the way. You read it and you see it. That’s how it should be.

Tom Orzechowski used every lettering trick in the book to tell the story. His lettering was another character on the title, not in a distracting way, but in an additive way. He was fluent in a number of tricks, and he had the diversity to nail each one.

Add to that, he did it all in the hand drawn lettering days. These aren’t computer shortcuts or standard template tricks. He did each by hand, giving each imperfect panel a sense of character absent in comics today.

The panel above shows a variety of lettering styles in one panel, from balloons butted up against the border, to joined balloons, to balloons separated by a tail. We have straight tails indicating speakers, and slightly bent tails.

Alison’s laughter shows three different lettering styles, and even Betsy’s “Oh” is in letter case, to help color the expression.

And, yes, they’re at a club where a shirtless man with a mullet is pulling Ororo up on stage to dance with him. (And it works!)

This panel is another great example of how the writer and letterer can combine to make something greater. Again, I can’t see the original script. I don’t know if Claremont specified every balloon in this panel or if Orzechowski added some in, but the combination of the two elevates the moment.

That repeated “OW” punctuates every breath Jubilee takes as she struggles. She can’t get a single sentence out without three interruptions. And each “OW” gets slightly bigger as her effort gets more desperate. The burst balloon style explodes with the last one, too. Orzechowski sells this moment.

The next panel cuts away from Jubilee, but it’s evident that she hadn’t finished her thought here. Those two dashes at the end of “– I can’t bust loose — ” tell us that.

Silvestri shows us that Jubilee is restricted and fighting, but the dialogue and the way that the dialogue is physically presented in the panel give Jubilee her voice. It’s more than just text you need to read to follow the story. It’s a very important part of the storytelling.

That’s the letterer’s job. Tom Orzechowski is very good at his job, indeed.

Visible Lettering

My comics crusade is railing against the idea that the best lettering is invisible.  It isn’t.  If it’s good, you’ll see it, you’ll notice it, and you’ll enjoy reading it.

Tom Orzechowski’s work on “Uncanny X-Men: ticks all those boxes. It’s as visually delightful as the art and punches up the story as much as a good one-liner or plot twist.  It plays well with others and strengthens the comic.

It always jumped out at me when I opened an issue of “Uncanny” at the time and found someone else’s lettering. It impacted the story for me, because it made reading the book a little less fun.

I could look at Orzechowski’s lettering all day.

I hope this column has helped explain some of the reasons why I feel so strongly about it, and maybe it’ll even be an eye-opener for you, the next time you crack open a Claremont-era X-book.