…elicited a cry of pain from me, for what must be familiar reasons to most hereabouts, by now.

This time I decided to look a bit further, and checked the four commercial hand lettering fonts I have on my computer.

This merely confirmed what I have been saying for years. Many people using hand lettering fonts apparently do so without realizing these ALL CAPS styles still have their own versions of "upper" and "lower" case. But thinking "Comicbooks are lettered in all caps," these folk are obviously hitting the CAPS LOCK key, and the result is what we see above. First line, typed normally, second line typed with CAPS LOCK.

The Spider-Man cartoon appears to use the last of the four fonts -- with CAPS LOCK on.

sigh

sign. There the serifs on the "I" work, because ALL the letters have serifs. But in the middle of a bunch of plain letters, those serifs leap out at me as jarringly as would a change of font.

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As I said, even tho comicbook lettering is traditionally ALL CAPS, it still has its own kind of upper and lower case. Thus, a serifed "I" for the personal pronoun, as in "I", "I'm", "I'd" etc. And, if one MUST, for words like Indiana. There is also a J with serifs, for proper names like "James" and when a J word falls at the beginning of a sentence.

But, again as I said, "letterers" -- who in many cases these days are just typists -- seem to have no concept of the "language" of comics, and so, knowing comicbook lettering is "ALL CAPS" hit the CAPS LOCK key, apparently not realizing that with most commercial fonts that is not necessary.

(Perhaps they cut their typing teeth on fonts like Comic Sans, which actually HAS lower case, in the fashion of that madness Marvel went thru a while back.)

I like to think of the serifs being for the 'CAPS' in an 'ALL CAPS' font - i.e., 'capitalised' capitals, if that makes sense.

Probably comes more naturally to me, for a rather esoteric reason - I never quite learned how to hold a pen properly (not sure why, though it might also be partly why I can't click my fingers in my right hand - everything's very subtly 'off'), and so I actually find writing in capital letters faster and less laborious than writing in joined-up. Oh, sure - for neater stuff, I can agonise over doing things 'properly', but in most cases, expediency means caps for me.

As a result, to distinguish between the 'capital' letters in names, proper nouns, etc., I'd write those caps larger than the other letters, similar to the size/height difference between capital/lower case letters normally. So for me, there's a difference between 'lower capitals', and 'capital capitals'. Again, I'm hoping this all makes some kind of sense... ...anyone?


With all that in mind, reading the Spider-Man cartoon from JB's first post, and with the 'serifed' letter 'i's being shorthand for 'capitalised' caps, IT JUST READS LIKE SPIDER-MAN IS SHOUTING EVERYTHING, WHICH IS PRETTY DISCONCERTING TO READ.

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I've seen some online wonks make that same complaint about proper comicbook lettering. Mostly in defense of Marvel's stupid mixed-case fiasco.

"Well, you know, the New York Times isn't printed in all caps!" No it's not. And it doesn't have comics, either!

I think the pain of seeing that serifed "I" on every other comic font lettering will never stop.  If I were an editor, I'd have a reply for every letterer whose only resource was the Photoshop text editor:

W.H.M? THINK!

(W.H.M. here stands for "What the Hell's the Matter?"  It was used by a racing team owner for one of his drivers back in the rough-and-tumble old days of NASCAR, when said driver would constantly run the car to ruins trying to get in front.  Needless to say, we don't have bosses like that anywhere these days, it seems.)

I consider myself lucky to have come into The Biz when many of the old hands were still in charge. (Taught how to draw Spider-Man's webbing by John Romita Sr. Ha!!) Even with that, I will admit it took me quite a long time to Get the Hang of It.

But a lot of the people who have come in after me don't even WANT to get the hang of it. They have watched a long of Japanese anime, and read a few comics, and they think they've got it nailed. Storytelling? What's that? Coloring? Lots of special effects, right? Lettering --- well, CAPS LOCK and you're off!

   I'll have to confess to being one of those who watched the Japanese animated serials and thought of ways to apply some of that to American superhero comics.  Perhaps for the better, I never did get to do what Joe Madrureira would soon be doing, but instead opted for scaling it back a little bit to let the original American influences shine through more, and avoided the silly cartooning tropes that Mad and others were now bringing in.  These were the guys who were taking so many of the familiar characters off-model, as it has turned out.

   Perhaps the biggest beef that I have about today's excuse for "storytelling" is that they're convinced somehow that what artists like Katsuhiro Otomo in Akira and Kenichi Sonoda in Gunsmith Cats were doing could be transmitted to a monthly comicbook about superheroes.  It can't.  The publishing schedules and target audiences are far different.  You could stretch out a sequence of action for several pages in a Japanese comic because it was being published in weekly or bi-weekly installments.  The audiences for American comics expect the action to take up only one page at most, with the conflict being wrapped up by the issue's end.  At 22 pages a pop, you can't have half that issue being taken up by Captain America flinging his shield at the Red Skull (my exaggeration).