Appreciating Tom Orzechowski’s Lettering Choices (Part 2)

Today is Letterer Appreciation Day 2018.

Last year, I made a video analyzing some of the many choices Tom Orzechowski had to make in lettering a particular “Uncanny X-Men” sequence over John Byrne’s art.

Coincidentally, this year, I started to think about lettering while reading “Excalibur: Mojo Mayhem.”  Written by Chris Claremont, Art Adams drew the story featuring the return of the X-Babies. Tom Orzechowski lettered the front half of the book.  I wrote a short review of the book for ComicBook.com this week.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Orzechowski’s lettering choices and all the little things he does in this book above and beyond what a typical letterer of the time would normally do.

So let’s talk about those choices this year for Letterer Appreciation Day.

 

Letterers Should Be Seen

First, something that always bears repeating:

Letterers can do a great job and still be noticed.  In fact, I’d argue that the best letterers are the ones who contribute to both the ease of reading for a comic book and also the sheer beauty of the page.  Readers should notice it, and it should look good.

There is a stylistic element to lettering that cannot be ignored.  It needs to gel with the art in some way, or it sticks out like a sore thumb.  It needs to tell the story well without interrupting it.

And the letterer works their magic at the end of the production line under tight deadlines and with quick changes at the last possible second, sometimes repeatedly.

Tom O. handled a lot of Chris Claremont scripts in the 1970s and 1980s.  His style was nearly synonymous with Claremont’s X-Men.  The X-Men never felt right without him, right up to and including Claremont’s final issues with Jim Lee.  Fill-in letterers during the Byrne era were always a disappointment.  This wasn’t because you didn’t notice Orzechowski’s lettering. Just the opposite.

 

Lettering is Storytelling and Lettering Is Style

C’mon, loook at these two panels and tell me the comic, overall, doesn’t look better in the first.  The letterforms are much more regular; The stacking looks nicer.  The balloons are shaped better.

I know it’s a bit of an unfair comparison. There’s a lot of art to work around in that second panel, but I think the impact of the lettering, overall, still shows.

Orzechowski only did the first 23 pages of this 48 page book.  Jade Moede lettered the rest.  Her style is good.  She follows many of Orz’s conventions in laying out balloons.  But her lettering style is more uneven, less confident, less consistent.  I have no doubt that I’m one of the few who would notice such things, but it seems a huge difference after seeing Orzechowski’s square letter forms filling up the balloons.

(Also, because I don’t mean to pick on Moede here: This is extremely early work for her.  It’s one of her first lettering credits.   She left comics 20 years ago now, but her work keeps getting reprinted thanks to the new Collected Edition economy.  She was not a bad letterer.  I’m just pointing out how a different style makes a comic look different.  Lettering cannot simply be ignored.)

This is back in the hand lettering days, so the specific style of the letterer was extra important to the overall enjoyment and style of the comic.  The “font,” as we’d call it these days, was often the biggest difference any two styles.

Lettering is storytelling.  It needs to tell the story as much as the script or the art or the coloring does.  It’s not just a step that the letterer mechanically applies to art to give the reader some cues.

There are few letterers who excelled at adding to the storytelling more than Tom Orzechowski.  It’s a class of artist that includes John Workman, Todd Klein, and Dave Sim.

For today, let’s look at a few more of Orzechowski’s choices.

 

Lettering That Mimics the Speed

Here we have an excited character, talking a mile and minute and hyperventilating from it.

In other words, she’s talking a lot and she’s talking fast and it chokes the air out of her until she collapses.  Let Orzechowski show you how it’s done with a technique I can’t remember ever seeing anywhere else:

That’s right, he draws the balloon as being too small for the lettering.  She’s talking faster than it can come out of her mouth.  It’s a small trick and only done at the very fringes of the balloon, but it’s brilliant.

And in the third balloon of that panel, you see where she finally runs out of air and collapses.  The balloon deflates at the bottom and her words fall out of it, ending in a satisfying set of breath marks/roachlegs/fireflies.

The lettering acts in the same way the character does.  It tells the story. It’s interesting to look at. It’s well drawn on the page.  (This is from the hand lettering era, after all.  This is all drawn on the page.)

I also like the soft “whump” in the next panel as her body hits the ground.  Judging from the puffs of air Art Adams/Terry Austin drew behind her, it feels like a soft landing.  The smaller size “whump” with its outline mimic that feeling for me, as well.

 

Lettering That Mimics the Volume

This is a simple one, but check out how Orzechowski uses the three “Oh boy”s in that first balloon.  You can hear that in your head, can’t you?  You know the character is getting more and more excited. His voice gets progressively louder with each repetition.  The lettering grows in size as the volume does. You don’t even need an exclamation point, though that swoosh on the bottom helps, too.

On the other side of the panel, Rogue speaks quietly, so her lettering gets smaller in the balloons, but the balloons stay at full size.  That extra air in there helps give the lines a quieter, breathier quality.

Don’t believe that a letterer helps to tell the story?  Orz just drew lettering in three different styles in one panel to help sell what the characters are saying.

 

Lettering That Mimics the Number of Voices

Here’s a trick Orzechowski pulled off a ton of times in his work with Chris Claremont.  It’s the old saw where a crowd of people are all talking over each other, so Orz draws the word balloons over each other.  The overlaps mimics the same way the voices sound one on top of the other.  And by keeping each nugget of dialogue short, Claremont’s script gives the lettering a chance to visually mimic the way the voices would overlap in a cacophony. It’s just everybody talking at the same time, all over each other.  The balloons also look a bit larger than they need to be.

 

Happy Letterer Appreciation Day!

That’s it for me for this year.  Hopefully, you see a little more in the lettering you read this week.  Maybe you’ll notice what the letterer is trying to do, and how they’re trying to help the story beyond just spelling everything right.

Letterers are an important part of a comic books’ creative team.  Odds are good that the reader looks at the lettering more than the art when they’re reading a comic, after all.  Why short shrift that part?

If you’re looking for someone to study, you can’t go wrong with some classic Tom Orzechowski “X-Men” lettering.  That stuff is pure gold.