#On Comics

[valeriehalla]

Not to put you on blast, but speaking as a comic artist, I can tell you that all that random emphasis isn’t actually as random as you might think!

I’m sure every comic letterer has their own criteria for when and how (and whether) to employ this technique, but the way I see it, there’s a couple of overlapping reasons why it’s done:

It makes the text a bit more legible. The bolded words act as visual landmarks that help guide the reader through the text. Comic text is pretty weird, typographically speaking: it has a very small line-height and it’s center-aligned, not to mention it’s usually printed in allcaps. This is all done in the interest of conserving space for the illustrations, but it makes for text that can be kind of fatiguing to read. The extra visual emphasis on key words and phrases can make it easier to quickly parse the text, especially in larger speech bubbles.

It also serves the usual purpose of indicating the natural word emphasis that people employ when speaking English. Usually you’d just use italics for that, but italics are hard to distinguish in handwriting, so letterers will use either bold or bold-italics for the job. Beyond that, the difference is mainly down to quantity: comic letterers traditionally go a bit ham with this technique, whereas it’d be gauche to do the same thing in prose. But that’s a matter of convention.

Emphasis on the word traditionally in that last point, by the way. In truth, this convention has been on its way out for a while. Lots of comics these days even have lowercase letters! It’s easier to pull off with the switch to digital lettering. But I still find the practice charming as heck.

[barakorner]

Kalat Club and 30 Summers Ago: Love Letters to a Sapphic Past

Time is a fascinating element in stories. It is a fundamental part of storytelling, essential to a narrative’s setting. Sometimes it’s treated as an afterthought, and its implications to a story are not interrogated. But some of the best stories I’ve enjoyed are ones where time makes itself inextricable to the narrative, looming, sometimes haunting, a foundation for the events that will unfold.

When it comes to queer-centric stories, knowing when the story is set adds a layer of understanding as to why characters act the way they do. The dynamics between sapphic characters will be different between a story set during the late 70s versus a tale set during the American occupation. The context is different. The stakes are different.

There are a lot of sapphic stories set in times far past, but right now, I want to focus on two comics that situate themselves in recent history, set in the near past of the 2010s and the 2000s.

First released as part of the Silakbo GL Anthology, Kalat Club and 30 Summers Ago are two stories that situate themselves in two different periods, and this placement in time is integral to the story they are trying to tell. They are both love letters to past selves and hope for a better, queer future. And it’s because of this I want to take the time to talk about how time situated itself in these two entries and what that means for sapphic comics and stories in the future.

If you'd like to read more, the rest is on my medium page!

Wrote a little something on two comics that I liked from Silakbo, and how these two entries reflect what the world was like to a queer teen in that time :D.

[pocketss]

houseplant type friend

[an-na-ko]

Saw it was make a terrible comic day today (June 24 2025) so meet my cats

[making-friendos]

Local goat discovers joy of painting

[chaossmith2]

"... You're what??"

[bamjammy]

Today I met happiness

[leslekieuart]

do y'all remember when they found all that tf art in Osamu Tezuka's drawer post-mortem because I think about it often

anyway keep chasing your bliss and draw weird shit, god knows we need that right now

[nattousan]

*doom music starts to play* I actually kindof like scheduling these kinds of appointments now...

but seriously Fellas, don't forget to schedule a pap smear every couple of years just in case. If you still have a cervix you can still get cervical cancer. ilu

this has been a psa

[chunkysoup22]

[youhavethewrong]

by @beetlemoses

[zkyeline]

Maybe this therapy shit is working

[pocketss]

widehead

[yeehawpim]

I can be shaped by more than the things that hurt me

[shencomix]