The Ultimate Guide to Lettering Comics

September 1st is Letterer Appreciation Day. Timed to the great Gaspar Saladino’s birthday, this is an opportunity for the comic book world to look at the unsung art of slinging letters across the pages of sequential narrative in a way that tells the story without tripping up the reader.

It’s a harder job than many realize, and this year at Pipeline I’m taking a look at a book that explains it all to you, and should be a part of any comic creator’s library.

Essential Lettering Credits

Nate Piekos’ “The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering” threads the needle perfectly in creating a How-To book that encompasses both the artistic and technical parts of adding all the words to a comic book. It’ll teach you how to do it, and why.

It’s the Bible of comic book lettering.

Piekos provides all the Adobe Illustrator techniques you need to know to push all the buttons in the right order to get the job done. But also, along the way, he explains the reasons why you want to do it in those ways. He goes over everything from the Crossbar-I rule to the balloon tail width guidelines to how to layer balloons and how to explode a sound effect.

After you read this book, you can save it and use it as a reference manual for the next comic you letter. Most questions you’ll have about how to do a specific effect you dreamed up will show up here. He does a good job in building up your skills as the book goes along. You’ll see the commands and the menus he uses most often in different combinations to achieve certain effects. That repetition helps train your muscle memory, but it also shows you that it’s a simpler job than you might have imagined. Adobe Illustrator is a monster of a program, but if you learn the right 10% of it, you’re good to go.

Easy to Follow Technical Manual

There’s a smart combination of examples, screenshots, and explanatory text in this book to help you learn all the techniques. While it’s still recommended to work along with the book to practice the techniques described, it’s very easy to follow what’s going on even if you’re sneaking in a chapter on your lunch break at work and don’t have a Wacom Cintiq handy.

The text walks you through what you need, the examples are plentiful, and the screenshots are well-placed and focused. You’re not getting entire screenshots to show you one menu or one dropdown. You get just what you need.

(As someone who once ran a Clip Studio Paint tutorial site, I can appreciate the effort that goes into combining those factors into something that makes sense.)

As I mentioned before, the skills build up. You’ll use the same key commands to get you started with something, but then add a variety of tweaks to it to get each new effect. You’ll build up the foundation of the skill set without realizing it. You’ll only need to get back to the book to find that one filter you need for the specific thing you had in mind but couldn’t remember the menu name for.

The first 10% of illustrator will give you those key skills. The other 90% is still there for you down the road. I bet learning some of that later will bring you new techniques and styles that you’d never understand or dream of without getting these basics down first. The learning process is never-ending. In a world where more and more letterers change up styles wildly between titles, those new ideas will help set your skills apart.

The other thing I appreciate about the book is the way Piekos shows you some of the shortcuts he uses to save time. Lettering can be a grueling process, one that’s exacerbated by ridiculous deadlines (and, let’s face it, low pay.) Sprinkled through the book are methods by which you can repeat styles and techniques with a minimum of effort, starting with the lettering template he describes in the beginning of the book and all the things you could add to it along the way.

That’s the kind of practical instruction that isn’t necessarily a core skill, but will keep you from losing your mind by page 20 of a 22-page comic. Every automation counts.

The book is Apple-centric, by the way. All of the screenshots and keyboard shortcuts are Mac-based. If you’re on Windows, you can still letter comics, but you’ll mentally have to change the key named “CMD” to “CTR” in all the explanations. Also, Windows will have colored circles in the upper left instead of “X”es in the upper right, though there are few screenshots that show that much of the screen.

Time Flies

I learned a lot about lettering comics almost twenty years ago now on the late and much-missed Digital Webbing message boards. Adobe Illustrator has come a long way since then, and if you’re learning lettering today then you have no idea just how good you have it.

I learned a lot about the new additions to the application through this book. Just the fact that you can draw a shape and Illustrator will flow the lettering into it to fit is a real game changer, let alone all the font technologies now that will do everything from eliminating the crossbar-I to alternating letter shapes so double letters don’t look alike.

I’m jealous of you if you’re starting now.

These days, I use Affinity Designer for my vector-based graphic design needs. That covers everything from creating graphics for this website to signs for my wife’s classroom. It’s fairly equivalent to Illustrator, but I don’t know if it does things like that lettering flow I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back. I need to check on that.

While Illustrator is the standard for professional comics production, I’d love to see the Affinity Designer version of a book like this for those who prefer a one-time application purchase over Adobe’s subscriptions. For webcomics or occasional lettering usage, that would be handy, but translating the core skills is not that hard.

Beyond the Basics

Nothing is overlooked in this book. Piekos describes a day in his life as a letterer. He goes over all the equipment he uses to get the job done, from the software to the standing desk.

He shows examples of invoicing for his work, walks you through creating a lettering template, a type morgue, and how to package the final pages together.

As strong as this book is in covering all the basics, it also does a great job going to the next step and filling in the day-to-day things that might be overlooked in a general tutorial. It’s the extra personal color from the author that you wouldn’t get in a purely technical manual. I appreciated that.

A Matter of Taste

There’s still the artistic part of lettering that will come from the individual letterer. Font choices and balloon styles to match the comics project are things no book can teach. Logos and sound effects and credit boxes can go even further. While Piekos does provide plenty of guidance and advice in this book, he can’t teach you good taste. You still need to learn that for yourself.

It’s the dirty little secret of comic lettering: The job is one of graphic design that just happens to be applied to comic books in the aid of storytelling. It’s not just about what looks right in the context of the comic, but also what works right in service to the story.

For that, you’ll have to rely on experience, breakdowns of others’ work, and some outside graphic design education. Again, we get back to the more you learn, the more you realize you have left to learn. It’s a never-ending and very vicious cycle.

What’s Missing?

You’re not going to learn how to create a font. That’s a purposeful choice that Piekos addresses in the book. It’s just too big a topic, and one that’s worthy of a book on its own.

I do wish someone would write that book, though I doubt it would be a popular enough topic to drive enough sales to warrant writing it. (Much like the Affinity Designer version of this book, sadly.) Maybe it’s a smart online course for some enterprising soul out there someday.

From what I understand of the topic, there are a lot of small technical decisions that need to be made, many of which go by feel more than numbers. It’s hard to teach that. There are general guidelines and the rest is, again, a matter of good taste.

Unfortunately, if you search on the topic online, all you’re going to find are the shortcuts and the online tools that will create something for you that will look like utter trash in use. Sadly, most people won’t even realize that the stuff looks awful. If you’ve read this far, you’re a far more discerning person than that, I’d bet. You and I will continue to be frustrated by those shortcuts.

That lettering sample above? That’s Moebius. Good luck creating that font! Just look at the way those letters are jammed together, even between lines…

Recommended?

If comic book lettering is a topic of interest to you, then yes. Even if you’re not planning on starting a webcomic tomorrow and creating an Adobe account to do so, there’s a lot of information in this book that’s good to learn.

If you are planning your own comic book venture, then please do a better job on your lettering. It’ll make your comic ten times more readable. This book can help get you there.

Follow Nate Piekos on Twitter, where he’s always delivering lettering tips, many derived from the pages of this book.

Appreciating Lettering More

For more articles on the topic of lettering, check out the archives here at Pipeline Comics to find these articles:

Appreciating Tom Orzechowski (Part 1) (The very first Letterer Appreciation Day)

Appreciating Tom Orzechowski’s Lettering Choices (Part 2)

Appreciating Tom Orzechowski (Part 3)

European Comics Lettering

Comics Reviewers Should Try Making Comics, in which I talk a little about my own lettering experiences.

That time I confused Richard Starkings and John Workman

Willie Schubert Teaches Lettering

Lettering, the Marcinelle School Way (The Ames Guide’s European Absence)

Small Lettering Change. Big Improvement? (In which I re-letter “Valerian” to prove a point)

5 Ways to Incorporate Lettering Into Comic Art (looking at Chris Samnee’s Rocketeer work)

5 Common Webcomics Lettering Mistakes (in the early years of this site, this was one of the most popular posts)

TLDR Show Me The Video