Fonts & Ethics

When I first tackled the issue of lettering Leo Fox I realised that I had neither the time nor inclination to master traditional hand lettering technique. (It's on the list of things to do before I die but hell people we have a project to finish here) So I decided upon an approach that blended hand writing style fonts with bits and pieces of hand lettered text scattered around.

I had been reading Bleach online and as Bleach is scanned and translated by enormously dedicated Manga fans it is lettered entirely by amateurs. This amazing level of dedication aside, the guys who letttered bleach used lettering that was sympathetic to the action and emotion being relayed by the characters. To clarify, the lettering was not uniform in style and could change to indicate different characters, moods etc. I liked this approach and decided to try and use it.

When we sent issue one to our contact in the industry the one thing he didn't like was the lettering. He acknowledged that he might be out of date in wanting to see uniformity but he raised it nonetheless. After all, in issue one every set of characters speaks with their own font.

Uniform capitalised lettering - the Marvel Way

The problem as I see it is this, if the lettering attracts too much attention it breaks the spell of the story by forcing the reader to pay attention to the way the story is told rather than the story itself. Now i'm more inclined to agree with this and I am considering reverting to a more uniform style of lettering. In fact i'm more or less copying the lettering style in Alan Moore's the Watchmen.

I use a simple 20  dollar piece of software called scan-a-hand  to draw my fonts and convert them into TT. I want  the final cut of Leo Fox to contain ONLY fonts that I have made myself so as to avoid copyright problems further down the line. But here is where the ethical question arises. If I copy another font by hand, thereby bringing in natural flaws and quirks and adding a few of my own details,  is that OK?

I'd love to illustrate this post with examples but I can't because all my fonts are in a van in France. But that's another story...

The Fun Bit

One of my favourite parts of this process is seeing initial sketches come back from Paul and especially when they are new characters I haven't seen yet. Right now, Paul is throwing uploads of page roughs from issue 3 into our secret facebook group from which we manage the project. (Yeah this whole project has been coordinated through FB - Perhaps a subject for another post...)

So I have recently seen Leah Fitz for the first time which was ridiculously exciting for me. I have a strong feeling about her, I think she could grow into a hugely powerful character and a real super villain for our times.

Issue 3 has been much tougher to write than the previous two. The script alone weighs in at 4500 words which is more than double the size of issue 2. I tried to keep it down to 24 pages but I doubt it will fit so issue 3 could well be a bumper size special. Fortunately Paul seems excited enough about the story to carry the extra workload of more pages.  (It is a huge job to water colour every last panel)

I can't say exactly why issue three was so tough to write. Perhaps because our expectations have risen, perhaps because we had to bring satisfying resolution to a complex set of narratives, perhaps because endings  are just hard work. But for all that the fun bit is that much more fun because now I can see it come to life  in Paul's increasingly dynamic sketches.

I don't know much about comics but I know what I like.

On the 11th March I recieved the following somewhat breathlessly excited missive from my paintbrush jockey, Wheeler.

"Okay stop what you are doing and take note. Homework this week, the greatest comic of all time. Elektra Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. It has all them qualities we are grasping for, poetry, pace, epic story, amazing and original artwork, sheer brilliance! I missed this on account that I took it for granted, wasn't interested in Elektra as a character and sort of hadn't seen the artwork enough, but the recent refinding of Bisley had me realising his inspiration was sienkiewicz, and so one of the boys at work lent me the graphic novel. Its amazing!"

Some time later I found myself on Amazon with some money in the bank and thought I'd have a gander. Here is a picture of the book in question for all you jittery image obsessed readers who need a photo in between every par to keep you smiling...

Anyway I read it and it did blow me away. I still haven't fully got my head around it and I hasten to add that I'm not about to review it right now. It got me thinking about my relationship with comics. You see I came to Leo Fox as an outsider really, not having ever considered myself a comics fan. Paul on the other hand has grown up reading hundreds of the things.

In the past two years that we have been working on this project I have been systematically reading 'the greats'. I've gone through the Watchmen (In Spanish, because I can jejeje), the whole of the Promothea series, a wide range of Will Eisner and now Elektra. I'd also read Sin City, Dark Night Returns and a smattering of Batman in my youth alongside loads of Tintin and Asterix. I keep meaning to try some journalistic comics having dipped into Joe Sacco's Palestine and having absolutely loved the Waltz with Bashir movie, but I haven't got round to it yet. (BTW There is a fantastic set of video podcasts available on iTunes detailing a Stanford University project to make a docu-comic book called Shake Girl.) I am also certain I'm going to love the Sandman when I finally get to it.

I'm not eager to get into neurotic indy stuff like Robert Crumb. I'll try and keep an open mind to it and I did enjoy the Ghost World movie so maybe I should give it a try. And as for manga I tend to fall in and out of like with it but I do have a place in my heart for Bleach at least. (Again Bleach was a research suggestion from Paul - we see Leo Fox as a kind of European Manga) ((Incidentally Manga means sleeve in Spanish))

So what the hell is this post about? I'm still not sure but it's been fun to track my personal journey into comic books. What was yours?

Oh and as with love, the first cut is the deepest...