I agree with him.

Another reason 21st Century comics are dull.

For the record, the Kupperberg era of JB comics is probably my favorite JB vintage...he was doing EVERYTHING BY HIMSELF except the colors.

Did you also letter 261 of Iron Man?

Thanks.

I think comics have lost something with the computerization of lettering, but I think those Moebius pages in the interview pretty much disprove his point.  I'm all for an artist lettering his own work if he can do a top flight job of it.  Mediocre or substandard lettering, however, doesn't magically become any better just because it's being done by the guy who drew the page.

Mike

If Moebius as an artist feels that his own lettering better complements the art, I'm not one to argue. Most of his work that I've read have been translations, some of them handlettered in a different style and some typeset.

And personally I feel his own lettering, after I've seen it, is inarguably better than most of them, albeit less legible than the best of the others.

Certainly, from an artistic point of view, when lettering and/or colouring is done by someone other than the artist, they should still take their cues from the artist, directly or indirectly, and the artist should be able to object to lettering and colouring that interferes with storytelling and have it altered.

Of course, Moebius makes reference to Caniff (through Jije), who employed many assistants, one of whom did the lettering. If his aside had stopped at Jije, it might have supported his point (I don't know) but as it seemed to extend to caniff, he undercuts himself.

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My own actual hand lettering SUCKS!! See WHEELIE AND THE CHOPPER BUNCH, DOOMSDAY + 1, or SPACE: 1999. Even making a computer font of it didn't help.

So, yeah, I would definitely agree that lettering, like inking or coloring or writing, is something the artist should do only if s/he's GOOD at it!

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Alas, there was no "creation" involved. That might have been part of the problem, in fact!

I just PRINTED, using a Rapidograph pen.

This is why I was so happy to discover computer lettering. I started making my own fonts -- dozens of them it seems! -- as soon as I understood how to do it.

(Back in the Charlton days, I had an IBM Selectric typewriter, with the letters on a spinning ball. That ball could be changed for different letter styles, and I heard it was even possible to get custom balls made. I thought about having one done of my own lettering. But two problems suggested themselves immediately. First, as I proved years later when I made a computer font of my own lettering, even tidying it up and making all the As, Bs, Cs etc the same didn't make it look any better. And, of course, on a typewriter there was no adjustment for kerning, which would produce those dread gaps we see even now when letterers don't do it properly. W AS, T A TTER, V ALVE, etc.)