The art and history of lettering comics | Hacker News Reader

The art and history of lettering comics

kleinletters.com

127 pointsO1111OOO13 comments

For an example of comic lettering 'in extremis', look at Charles Crumb (who was the big brother of the famous underground comic artist Robert Crumb). He obsessively drew the story of Treasure Island with a particular emphasis on long conversations between how Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins. Charles Crumb clearly had some kind of psychosis, whereby the text boxes in his comics became larger and larger eventually pushing out the images altogether. The text itself became nothing more than an impression of text (Graphomania?).

Hard to find good examples... a single example at the near bottom of the page here: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/c/crumb_charles.htm

A much later example here: https://blog.mumblelard.com/post/88300090/graphomania-or-cip...

Also check out the documentary on the three Crumb brothers.

Todd Klein's entire blog is amazing.

Elsewhere he has an entire six-part retrospective on working for DC in the '80s (aside from being a letterer, he was Assistant Production Manager for years) with tons of pictures of their offices and people.

https://kleinletters.com/Blog/the-dc-comics-offices-1982-199...

I've been a huge fan of comics since I was a kid, and the "inside baseball" side of the industry has always deeply fascinated me, so reading these articles was pure joy.

Nothing about herge but his speech bubble font was lovely

Ruined in the recent reprints where they used a handwriting font instead. I mean, an actual digital font instead of hand lettering, and it didn't much resemble the lettering by Herge (or, according to Wikipedia, one Michel Demaret).

I wondered who the letterist was. The old b&w has a great cursive which might be Herge himself but I entered the room with Leslie Lonsdale Coopers British translations in the 60s as red spine hardbacks, some of which I still have, and they will have Demartet's font style. The exclamation and question marks stick in my mind for some reason.

That is so utterly insane. Criminal! I guess that they were motivated by the ease with which the text could be translated into another language... but still criminal.

I found this, is this what you're talking about?

https://www.kimadrian.com/2012/12/casterman-makes-tragic-cha...

About (https://kleinletters.com/Blog/about-my-book/)

FYI / tl;dr

After about 5 years of back and forth and then not hearing from a prospective publisher about completing his book project Todd Klein decided to take all the work and publish it on his blog here as a series of articles (some previously posted that were part of the content he was building for the book).

hey - Todd Klein designed the logo for a Dr Strange from Marvel, it says in tiny print.

Klein did a ton of work for Marvel and DC since he got into the industry at the end of the seventies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Klein

Fascinating. I happen to own exactly that first issue of Shatter.

That's a pretty sick cover. It's like it's "dated" but in a good way. I love that sort of aesthetic, like a "techno/digital nostalgia"

Yeah, but at the time it was the newest thing since sliced bread. Literally printed on an Apple Laserwriter, probably using SuperPaint.

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