What Happened to Hand Lettering?

I get it. We all love hand lettering in comics. At least a couple of times a month I get an email from a comics fan who feels like they need to express their disdain for digital lettering. Their solution is usually naively simple: “The publishers just need to go back to hand lettering!” Other times I get: “Why aren’t you teaching people to hand letter?”

The short answer I offer is, “Because the industry moved on from hand lettering in the late 1990s”—approximately thirty years ago as I write this. But I feel like a more in-depth explanation is warranted. (And in doing so, I can use this article as my reply in the future.)

If you want to learn to hand letter, I absolutely encourage you to do so. It’s a difficult but rewarding process. Not only will it teach you skills that will improve your digital lettering and graphic design ability, but it creates immense satisfaction to learn a skill few people ever attempt. I think every letterer should make a serious effort to hand letter.

There is still plenty of hand lettering in small press/indie comics, but if your goal is a career in American/UK comics lettering, know that mainstream publishers (those that can provide enough steady work to make that career possible) will not being hiring you to hand letter comics anytime soon.

As you read this, keep in mind that comics is a business. Publishers wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t generate a profit. I hate to say it, but saving time and money is going to be a priority over artistic perfection.

Time - It takes far longer to letter a comic book by hand than it does via Adobe Illustrator. Schedules have gotten shorter, and shorter…and shorter. Most pro letterers will tell you that it’s not uncommon to be asked to turn around a whole issue in a day or two. That’s not possible with hand lettering. It simply takes too long. Deadlines must be met.

Money - Freelance rates in the comics industry have been decreasing for years. When I started lettering in the early 2000s, rates were approximately 25%-30% higher than they are now. As I mentioned previously, hand lettering takes longer to finish than digital lettering. Comics freelancers are paid by the page, and as you know, time is money.

Imagine that your page rate is $20, and let’s say as an experienced pro, you can finish digitally lettering an average page in about 20 minutes. With one 22-page issue, you just made $440 in just over seven hours. But don't forget: taxes are going to take 25%-30% of that!

Now, if it takes you forty-five minutes to hand letter an average page, you just made the same amount of money in about sixteen hours. The value of your work per hour just went from $60, to about $27 (again, pre-tax). Now you have to work more hours and somehow manage to get more jobs to make ends meet.

Workflow - When hand lettering was the norm, a letterer’s work would be completed after pencils, but before inks. This means the physical art would have to be overnighted to the letterer…the work completed…and then overnighted back to the publisher or inker. There’s just no leeway for this kind of time and expense. Even having the art scanned and FTP’d to a hand letterer would mean printing the art in large format (11”x17”), and using vellum overlays for the lettering. All of these steps take longer than simply digitally lettering scanned art.

Currently, digital lettering is completed after inks. In fact, the letterer and colorist can be working simultaneously, and then their work can be married together by the publisher, further saving time.

Also note that more and more modern comic book artists are adopting an all-digital approach—there are no pages of physical art to be hand lettered!

Corrections - There are always changes to be made after the first pass of lettering. Back in the hand lettering days, scripts were edited more tightly before getting to the lettering stage. That’s usually not the case now. Sometimes the corrections we get are extensive; whole conversations being re-written, balloons being moved from one spot to another, etc. In my 20+ years of lettering professionally, I’ve had maybe two or three single issues that were perfect in one pass. Imagine the amount of time and effort required to revise that many changes by hand. And you’re not getting paid any extra; standard practice in mainstream comics does not include extra fees for corrections. Remember the value of your page rate from above? It just got even lower.

Editors like having the ability to make these kinds of sweeping changes. They value the speed and ease of digital corrections far more than having to wait for you to white-out and redraw hand lettering. Editors are absolutely not going to give up that convenience.

Adaptations - When the lettering work is done, that may not be the final iteration of the work. Many publishers have English-language comics translated into other languages. This requires virtually every balloon on a page to be reshaped/resized to accommodate new volumes of text…a much less daunting and costly task if the digital lettering can be modified or stripped away entirely.

Many hand lettering proponents like to use the argument that digital lettering is not a real art because computers are involved. “You’re just pushing buttons” they say. Frankly, most of them have no experience doing either analog or digital design. The entire world has moved into the realm of digital graphic design; the food labels at the grocery store, the billboards on the highway, even the shoes you’re wearing were digitally designed. Good lettering is good graphic design, whether you’re using a pen on paper, or a stylus on a tablet. It’s all about the skill of the person.

I know this won’t be enough of an explanation for some of you, and that’s okay. I don’t enjoy being the bearer of what you may consider bad news, but this is the state of the industry from someone who’s been involved in it for half his life.

Enjoy your hand lettered comics from the past (I sure will!), but before you send that angry email, or make those snarky comments to a pro letterer at a convention, understand that we’re doing the absolute best we can in a system we didn’t create. Frankly, most of us do a damn good job and are proud of our work regardless of anyone else’s opinion.