An important part of a comic is the lettering. Your choice of font will set the tone for the whole story, in some ways.
Most people are happy to just grab a “comic book” font and do it like it’s always been done in the superhero comics: all caps, in a font that probably looks like it was drawn in a brush. Not me. I don’t come from that world; my stories don’t feel right with that tone of voice. I like upper and lower case, for starters.
Rita used Myriad Pro for the vast majority of the dialogue. It’s got bold and italics and multiple weights, and it’s a nice crisp serif font that fit the tone of the comic.
But Absinthe? Absinthe was done in a different era of my craft. Absinthe was done back when I was still nailing things down on paper before taking them into Illustrator. And Absinthe was lettered in the real world, with dialogue that sometimes became a part of the overall design of the page.
I want the new pages to stylistically match the first chapter. But I really don’t want to hassle with getting a paper-based workflow going again. So…
I’m gonna make my own font. I’ll still have to do some things by hand, or by doing a bit of paper lettering and bringing it into the computer. But I figure that tracing a bunch of these letters will give me a good start on a unique font that can have italics and bold. I’ll have to figure out how to have multiple versions of each character that change randomly; I hope that’s doable.
Right now I’m thinking of trying to make it with the lite version of Glyphs, which is a mere $50. If it does what I need then I’ll be delighted to not have to spend the $5-600 that serious font software costs.
(I may end up making the font available as a Patreon perk, as well. Dunno.)
edit. Here are some useful-looking links I found on making different character images cycle.
Contextual feature code samples – I like the idea of having a set number of variants for every letter that cycles with every character, rather than a lengthy hand-tuned set of variants. Seems like there isn’t an actual random number generator available; writing rules for selecting from multiple glyphs is what you have to do. (And what I ended up doing.)
also Common Techniques – I love the idea of making the glyphs move a bit by themselves, in the very last example. Might be a royal pain in the ass though.
Have you ever heard of MyScriptFont.com? It’s a free little service that allows you to create your own font for free. It’s pretty basic but it covers the standard english alphabet plus some special characters.
Yeah, that kind of thing came up in my searching. I’m reluctant to trust anything where I don’t end up with a source file I can edit and tweak. And reluctant to trust autotrace of anything!
In hand fonts it helps to have a bunch of ligatures (not connected forms necessarily) to replace most double letters. An “oo” glyph would have two differing o shapes that go together in the way you’d write it more naturally than two randomly selected ones.
I’ve been noticing that there’s a certain kind of feel to double letters in the stuff I’m working off of that’s not there in singles. Glad to know my vague ideas of doing double-letter ligatures is a frequent one!
When I was talking to one of my comic buddies that’s come a long way (now owns Drawn + Quarterly) and he saw some excerpts of Fite!, the first thing he said was, “Gah! No remade fonts! Do the lettering by hand!” So I cheated, made an alphabet by hand of what little I needed for Fite!, scanned them and live traced them. He said he saw a huge improvement. For Ghiroy, I’m doing it all by hand because.. stupid. That being said, I’ve been having more and more trouble reading comics with amazing art and the same old word balloons and text inside. I think text and art should be equally considered. But that’s just me.
I feel like a lot of people just reach for a “comic book” font and… ugh. No harmony with the hand that drew the pictures. Needing that harmony is a lot of why I chose to do the lettering in Absinthe by hand, and it’s why I’m sitting here hand tracing the lettering from chapter 1 to make a font I can use for the rest of the comic.
I think people’s attitudes to lettering need to change.