Topic: Looking for Fellow Letterers

Are there any other webcomic letterers out there? That is, folks whose primary focus is adding the text to comics, as opposed to creating all aspects of the comic.

I'd love to connect with other folks doing the same type of work I'm doing.

Well, I do the lettering and coloring for my husband's comic. I built the site and post the comics. So my primary focus isn't lettering, but I don't write or draw either. He and I are both pretty new at this.

lottart

Excellent! That's very similar to what I do... the heart of Dung Beetle Comics is myself, my husband Jack, and cartoonist Michael Moss. I originally signed on as a writer for a comic that is still in the design stage, and learned how to letter along the way. When Mike moved over to the ComicPress website, I ended up helping him set up and now handle all of our sites' upkeep, as well as post the comics once they're finished.

How did you get involved it in? Intentional or kinda sideways, like myself?

Oh, very sideways! Really there's just no one else to do it. My husband doesn't have a laptop with him on his semi. He brings the comics home with him and I take it from there.

Joanna

Wow. What made you guys decide to make a webcomic?

I'm sort of in the opposite position. I write and created the webpage and do the lettering (photoshop cs2, using the digitalstrip font from blambot), and my fiancee does all that tedious art. i found her when my old artist (who was pretty awful) needed to be fired for personal reasons.
It's fun collaborating, but dang can it be hard sometimes getting an artist to draw something exactly how i see it, and then finding good places to shove the words afterwards!

Which brings me to a serious question:

What's the benefit of hand-lettering compared to using a font in some graphics program? Or Is it personal preference?

biggest downfall of fonts is the lack of ability to do what you may want. i'm not willing to budget money for fonts so i'm stuck with the free ones on blambot - which usually means caps-only. i'm lucky to have found one (digitalstrip) that has bold and italics. the one i used before, webletterer, did not. and still, for SFX and whatnot i need to hunt for just the right font. it's more complicated than you might think, getting the words on the screen to match the sounds in my head.
were i doing hand-lettering i could just go brain-to-page. I'd ask my artist to do that, but it'd end in long arguments over lettering to add to the long arguments over setting and character. (in my latest strip, i didn't think the door int he scene should be blue because nobody paints a door blue. she disagreed because she was using blues for background to add emphasis to the non-blue characters. I lost the battle... this time.)

I wanted the personal touch of hand-lettering, but that would take me way too long to do if I wanted it to be legible. Instead I created a font based on my handwriting. It was a real chore and it's far from a perfect font, but it does what it's supposed to do and I'm sticking with it for now.

At this point I think it's really a matter of preference.

My preference, hands-down (no pun intended), is computerized lettering. You get a little less control, but there's a ton of fonts out there, some cheap alternatives for making your own, and a huge variety of effects you can create in Adobe Illustrator. It's also tons faster, and easier to manipulate and correct.