It can also be difficult to select and move the text around.

While you can letter a comic in Photoshop, to me it’s not very efficient and can lead to problems.įor one thing each block of text generates its own new layer, and can quickly make your file unwieldy. Photoshop does have anti-aliasing features, but I suspect it was set to “none” in the original letterers’ program. The look of the text led me to believe that it was done in Photoshop, and without the use of anti-aliasing.Īnti-aliasing is a now ubiquitous technology that smooths out the edges of fonts so they don’t appear jaggy or “chewy” as we used to say. If you notice, in the bad example the text is much thicker and somewhat rough looking. Years of working in pre-press taught me to constantly be on the lookout for any errors like this that might cause you to waste film and thus waste money.Ĭheck out the example below so you can get a feel for what I’m talking about: What I found when I checked out the files was that the text was quite jagged, or aliased. The art was excellent, but I had an issue with the lettering. He wanted to run the first pages by me so he sent over some hi-res files. To make the comic, he’d hired a crew to work on it for him, and most of it was what I considered to be top-tier work – except for the lettering. (Oh yeah, and my sister’s a writer, to boot, so this stuff runs in the family, I guess!) However, John’s enemies are numerous and closing in. As a second Big Bang explosion is set to consume the Earth in seven years, John “Lazarus” Thunderstarr and his space-time warping company Ragnaroc Inc are hired to find a solution to the impossible. “Embark on a hi-tech action adventure thrill ride with Ragnaroc Inc. Well, this thing is actually created and written by none other than my own little brother Jason Garrett. I know it seems a bit strange that I’d be working on someone else’s comic, especially doing the lettering of all things, so where’d this one come from anyway? Seemed like an easy job, but it turned out to be more involved than I thought! Read on for the sordid tale…

The only thing I had to do is add the lettering and my part was done. The different thing is that I didn’t make this comic. In today’s installment I’d like to take you guys behind the scenes in a different way than my usual posts. Regular readers will remember that I usually followed the comic with my working art and a “behind the scenes” write-up of the process of making the comic.

As you all know, I’m a comics guy and you’ve no doubt seen many if not all of my Monday Comics series.

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