#comic book lettering tickles most of the same parts of my brain that public transit signage does

[bigbigtruck]

Nothing's technically wrong with it; it's still readable. But I've been doing lettering professionally for 6 years now and a lot of these small quirks and irregularities bug me enough to justify the quick fix.

There's a whole set of stylistic and formatting conventions in comic lettering that are miniscule little details but end up coming together to aid readability and clarity--it's one of those 99% Invisible things, but once you get used to spotting and fixing them you can't unsee them.

Just ask any letterer who saw the first Spider-Verse film how glad they were to see the capital I's get fixed in the second, hee

Anyway I did NOT bother fixing the balloons; they're wonky until about 250 pages in but I Do Not Have The Time for revisions that extensive

Folks who are curious about this, I highly recommend Nate Piekos' book THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO COMIC BOOK LETTERING https://blambot.com/pages/the-essential-guide-to-comic-book-lettering A lot of it focuses on Adobe Illustrator-specific techniques in use by the Big 2, which I don't work with, but the widely-applicable principles like line breaks, glyphs, and balloon tails are covered and explained really well.

This weekend

I'm prepping the collected edition of TJ AND AMAL for its third printing. It's a strange feeling. ICC offered me the chance to make any revisions I wanted and while it's tempting to clean up all the old art and things I'd do differently now than 10-15 years ago, that way lies fucking madness. So I'm just making some text and formatting corrections. And friends, I had never done this before but going through that comic ONLY reading the text was goddamn wild