It’s that time of year … Pumpkin carving fun! Our Final Halloween seemed a fitting theme. The project is still going strong over on Kickstarter.
Category: Blog
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Medieval Style Comic Book Caption Boxes
I had fun creating some medieval style comic book caption boxes for a story recently so I thought I would share how they are put together.
To give you some idea of what I am talking about, before I delve into the steps you take to make it, here is the finished caption box and a blown apart version to show you the elements involved.
It starts life as a simple rectangle, but then I added two extra nodes, equidistant, to the left of the right hand edge and then pulled the right-hand handles out to line up with the rectangle right-hand edge to create the correct type of curve.
Then, I nudged the right-hand corners of the rectangle down enough to fit the other elements in. The first time around this took a little bit of trial and error.
Next, I created a squished ellipse that was centred, vertically, to the very bottom most point of our first shape.
I duplicated this shape about halfway up the box, perfectly in line.
Then, I joined these two ellipses together (I used a new rectangle, selected all three objects, and turned them into a single shape).
Next, I created our final shape, starting from the bottom-left corner of recently created rounded-rectangle, making a shallow curve in the centre point of it, then extending it directly up, finishing it off into a complete shape.
Then, I colour them accordingly to create the idea of depth and layers. The first shape we created will be the lightest, and last shape we created will be the darkest.
Then, lastly, we move the first shape to the top and hey presto – a simple scroll-style caption box.
I duplicate this for all the captions on the page and carefully resize without squishing any of the scroll part (very important).
And there you have it. Medieval style comic book caption boxes!
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3 Ways to Spot Amateur Comic Book Lettering
Most of my comic book lettering is done within the UK small press scene. It’s a scene I love being part of – so many awesome stories being told, and in a far more eclectic manner to mainstream comics. A down side of small press or self-publishing is that budgets are tighter, and as a result things like lettering get delegated to someone untrained in the art form. I am a graphic designer by training, and a perfectionist by nature and when the quality of lettering drops (as with any aspect of the story), I struggle to stay interested. As with any art form there is degree of subjectivity to it, but lettering is considerably further along the spectrum than the main pencil or inks of a story, or at least there a number of rules that need to be followed regardless of how “stylised” you claim your lettering is. I made ALL of these mistakes when I first started out, particularly number three!
When this came up on the Awesome Comics Talk Facebook group the other week it got me thinking about what creators could do, short of hiring a professional comic book letterer, to improve the lettering in their comic. It has taken me a few weeks to get this written, but here’s my “3 ways to spot amateur comic book lettering”.
1) The Cross-barred I
This is one that drives me a little bit crazy – because it’s not a secret. If you make comics, then I struggle to believe that this hasn’t floated by on your Twitter or Facebook feed at some point. It is an error that sometimes rears it’s ugly head in professional lettering too, usually where someone has missed a stray one. The rule is actually quite simple:
- Crossbarred I’s: use on personal pronouns i.e. I, I’ve, I’m, I’ll etc.
- Non-crossbarred I: use on EVERYTHING ELSE.
Some letterers/editors like to use a crossbarred version on acronyms like F.B.I. and M.I.5 which I don’t mind, but it’s an aesthetic decision in those circumstances. Comic book fonts, at least ones design by or for professional comic book lettering, come with both types of I’s. Where you find them vary’s between foundries, and also if the are lowercase letters, but if it’s not in the usual place it is behind the long vertical stroke: | (on my keyboard it is “shift” + “\”).
2) Leading
Leading is the space between two lines of text (historically from where they put actual bits of lead in between lines), so people call it line-height, which a web design term. Lines of text in comics need to be much tighter together than normal block of texts you will see in books, or on web pages. Traditionally letterers would mark out lines using an “ames guide” but this is now set in the software you are using. Annoyingly it varies from font to font, but as a rule:
- Set up your document so that when there is a word in bold in each line (above/below one another) there is a small amount of space between them, but they should not be touching. Use these settings across the rest of your pages.
3) Text Shape
By this, I am referring to how the lines of text are stacked in a balloon. Professional lettered dialogue is centre-aligned and almost always in a diamond/hexagonal shape with the longest lines being in the middle and the shortest lines being at the top and bottom. There a few other things to bear in mind when stacking lines of text:
- Avoid having single, short words in the first and last line.
- If you are writing dialogue, avoid putting very long words and the beginning or end of dialogue.
- Only hyphenate when there is no other option.
These are just a few of the mistakes you commonly see in lettering. Avoiding these will help, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are LOTS of rules that letterers take into account when doing their job, the real pros do most of these instinctively after years of practice. Some great places to start are: Blambot’s MANY fonts/resources – his tips section is fantastic; and Comicraft’s “Comic Book Lettering: The Comicraft Way“.
If all this sounds too much then there are lots of letterers available for hire – but you can get in touch with me via my contact page, or Twitter.
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VS Comics Interview – Part 2
Originally published in VS Comics #3 – March 2013Mike Stock // Digital Editor & Letterer // Interview
Can you talk us through your process, and any tools you use?
I could, but then I’d have to kill you … nah, all the dialogue, balloons etc. are created in Illustrator. I created my own blank templates in the software that are the US and UK page sizes and have bleed, trim and live area guides. I have separate layers for artwork, balloons, text, and SFX.
This set-up means I can drop in the artwork and scale it down to the page size so I am always lettering over the same size canvas. This also means I can just drop in updated art files as amendments come in – often I’ll start lettering over pencils and then the inks and colours come gradually as they are signed off. I like to involve the SFX in the artwork as much possible so they are made in Illustrator but then imported into Photoshop where I can manipulate them and the original image to blend them in in whatever way suits the style. The style is different for each story; it is dependent on that of the writing and the artwork. Sometimes it is quite simple but occasionally there is a bit more work involved like in Swan Song, for instance.
In Swan Song there is an immediate pace change to, say, ‘Eponymous’ and ‘Day and Night’, which are both full of action and are often very dark. Instead we are set in a geriatric ward of a robot-run hospital so the pace is quite thoughtful and the colour palette is very clean. There are several characters straight from the off: three humans, one of whom speaks solely through video screen; two robots, both with their own personalities; and a sort of mainframe computer who calls the shots. After reading the script and looking at the art I set about creating a sort of style guide, which outlined the dialogue for each of these characters.
The humans have normal white balloons, which I tweak slightly for the video character, and I chose a dialogue font that I felt had lots of personality. For Sadie and Stevie I gave their balloons’ corners and a pattern to emphasise their robotic-ness and a casual sans serif font (like what this is written in now) that contrasts the font used for the human dialogue. I coloured the pattern in relation to the speaker to help distinguish the dialogue and personalise it further. For the computer I squared up the balloons further and took the kink/bend out of the tails, sort of removing as much personality as I could. In cases where I make a style guide like this I’ll include it on a new layer in the Illustrator file and keep it locked and hidden so it is always close to hand, should I need it.
Logos and titles will often follow the same process as SFX but usually involve a lot more sketchbook (random scrap paper) work, I usually find it much easier to adapt and rework a typeface by hand. Photoshop gives me a lot more flexibility to have the element interact with the artwork should I need it to. Quite often I will also be entrusted with the production of the finished comic, either in a print-ready PDF or a digital format. For compiling these files I use InDesign; it links all the artwork files which means the original art is amended or changed and then I can just refresh the InDesign file and hey presto.
What are you working on outside of VS – Tell us about it.
Jon Lock has just got Afterlife Inc. #3 successfully ‘Kickstarted’ so I can look forward to that over the coming year, lots more Dead Roots too as that’s released quarterly. Also in the works: The Six should have popped up on your radars during LSCC (2013); Destiny’s Fate #3 is well on its way and has been really good fun; The GeeBees is shaping up fantastically and is due out this spring; I’ve just finished one issue of The Pride and there already 6 more in the pipeline; and something really funky called Raygun Roads with Owen Michael Johnson.
What inspires you?
Creativity; it sounds like a cop-out but, creativity is contagious. If I’m having one of those days where I’m not feeling creative I go hunting for other people’s. I collect images that make me think, make me laugh, or feel sad, happy, confused; anything, basically, that makes me stop and look at it again. I don’t leave them on my computer or share them on Pinterest or something weird, I print them out and stick them in a big ol’ scrapbook; which I can flick through.
Where do you see yourself in five/ten years time?
Well I’m new to comics as far as I’m concerned but I look forward to burrowing further and further in. I’ve not really been lettering for that long either so I’ll keep learning for now. Maybe in 5 years time I can be living off of comics … I think I’d like that.
www.michaelstock.co.uk
@sheriffstockyAnd there you have it. It was really fun to read through this again and, retrospectively, see where it has taken me; particularly the bit about what I was working on at the time. Jon Lock’s Afterlife Inc. rolled straight off of the success of #3 and into a MASSIVE collected edition called the ‘Book of Life’ which was also a huge Kickstarter success! The Six preview (available for download still) went down very well too. Destiny’s Fate led to an awesome anthology by it’s writer Devin L. Michaels called ‘Capitalism and Other Stories‘ which I lettered and did a lot of design work for. We finished all 6 issues of The Gee Bees which now exist in a hardback collected edition. I drew the cover art for that, a bit out of my normal comfort zone but I enjoyed it none-the-less. The Pride is going strong, we just released #4 of the main series and #2 of The Pride Adventures which are made up of shorter stories following the same team, filling out some of history of the Pride’s universe. And finally Raygun Roads was just nominated for ‘Best Comic’ at the British Comic Awards we lost out to Image’s The Wicked and the Divine but it was an honour to be recognised for what is a strong, and truly unique, comic book.
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BCA Best Comic Nomination
It’s a real pleasure to say that Raygun Roads, a comic that I worked on with Owen Johnson, Indio!, and Andy Bloor, has been shortlisted for ‘Best Comic’ at this years British Comic Awards. The winner is to be announced at Thought Bubble in Leeds later this month.
The ‘Best Comic’ nominees are:
- Dangeritis: A Fistful of Danger – Robert M Ball and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell (Great Beast)
- In The Frame – Tom Humberstone (New Statesman)
- Raygun Roads – Owen Michael Johnson, Indio!, Mike Stock and Andy Bloor (Self published)
- Tall Tales & Outrageous Adventures #1: The Snow Queen & Other Stories – Isabel Greenberg (Great Beast)
- The Wicked + The Divine #1 – Kieron Gillen, Jaime McKelvie, Matt Wilson and Clayton Cowles (Image Comics)
We are amongst some hard competition though in so it will be tough but, frankly, just being nominated is Exciting enough. Also to be in that list as the only self-published title, I think, is an amazing effort when you consider the readership that something like ‘The Wicked + The Divine’ has through a publisher like Image.
As if all of that isn’t exciting enough the team of judges includes the likes of Jonathon Ross, Jessica Hynes (Spaced) and Danny John-Jules (Red Dwarf). Incredible.
The 3rd Annual British Comic Awards Ceremony will take place at 6pm on Saturday 15th November in the Royal Armouries Bury Theatre in Leeds as part of the Thought Bubble Festival.
