Category: {comics}

A font design.

I’m still working on the new edition of my Lovecraft book, other projects permitting. The restoration gained a substantial boost last week when I finished re-lettering all the old comics pages, something I was initially reluctant to do given the amount of work involved. To date, there are 71 finished comics pages, 69 of which contain one or more lettered captions. This has never been a book where I’d want to use a typical US-style comics font, and with drawn pages you often want to avoid using book fonts which look too mechanical and precise when set among drawings. The thing to do—if I was going to do it at all—would be to design a font that would be a neater version of my hand-drawn lettering without looking so different that it changed the character of the pages. I’ve made fonts in the past but never taken the time to make one that would have to work this well.

There were two reasons for committing to all the effort. The first was that my lettering on the old pages had never been all that good to begin with. When I started work on The Haunter of the Dark in January 1986 the only comic strips I’d drawn had been jokey four-panel things while still at school. For the Lovecraft adaptations I was inventing my own method of comics adaptation from the ground up, paying little attention to prior examples beyond being vaguely inspired by Bryan Talbot’s first Luther Arkwright book, and the strips I enjoyed in Heavy Metal magazine. The Heavy Metal strips generally gave primacy to the art, with artwork that was more like illustration than production-line comic art. As with underground comics, most of the strips were also lettered by the artists themselves. The captions I drew on the second page of The Haunter of the Dark were pretty much invented on the spot, and since I tended to go along with these decisions once they’d been made, the first few pages established the look of all those that followed.

The weathered reference page from A Book of Lettering.

The lettering style I ended up with was an awkward amalgam of three different designs: my own lower-case letters, plus two sets of capitals taken from a page in A Book of Lettering (1939) by Reynolds Stone, one of my mother’s books from art school that she gave me when I was about 10 years old. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to use the Black Letter (or Gothic) capitals at the beginning of each new text box, with the uncials being used for any other capitals in the following sentences. By the time I’d finished the first story I was starting to think that using the Gothic caps was a bad idea, but rather than correct all the pages I stuck with the decision through The Call of Cthulhu and on into The Dunwich Horror. More of a problem for readers was that my lower-case letters were made with the same very thin pen I was using for most of the drawing, so they weren’t always easy to read. Once again, I stuck with the original decision.

All of which leads to the second reason for re-lettering the pages: if I was going to finish The Dunwich Horror then I’d have to letter any new pages in the old manner, hand-drawing boxes that matched the earlier pages. It was this factor that made me decide I’d much rather design a font based on my hand-drawn letters then apply this to all the pages in order to create a more satisfying and unified body of work.

The Bumper Book of Magic font.

If you’re used to working with vector shapes—something I do almost every day—dropping shapes you’ve designed into a font-making application is easy enough. The time-consuming part—and the thing that makes me avoid creating more fonts of my own—is applying all the kerning settings to every single character. Kerning is the name for the process that causes all the letters to sit neatly beside each other without any unsightly gaps. When I was working on The Bumper Book of Magic I created a font based on the book’s magical alphabet so I could type out words to use on some of the pages. I didn’t bother tuning the kerning for this design since it was only being used for headings, not passages of text; any uneven spaces were adjusted manually. My Lovecraft font isn’t as finely tuned as those produced by professional font designers but it does function as intended, and is much more readable than its hand-drawn equivalent.

Hand-drawn lettering from The Call of Cthulhu, 1987.

In digitising the letters I made a number of small adjustments. The upper-case letters are still rather uneven, being for the most part based on the uncial set from the lettering book. The lower-case letters have been tweaked a little so that the “t” isn’t so easily confused with the “e”, while all the loops on “g”, “j”, “p”, “q” and “y” now match each other. I’ve followed the original design by creating two sets of tails for these letters. The looped tails were an affectation that had a tendency to impinge on any letters running underneath which meant I had draw half loops to avoid having a tall letter or a capital collide with the loop above it. I’ve grown used to seeing the looped tails, and I wanted to keep them for the font design, so to evade collisions I made an extra set of letters with half tails which can be used at appropriate instances. In doing this I was pleased to see that some of the loops made ligature-style joins with the ascenders of letters like “h” or “k”. I can imagine typesetters frowning at the occasional overlaps of tails with ascenders but I don’t mind this so long as the readability of the sentence isn’t affected too much.

The same passage re-lettered (and slightly rewritten), 2025.

The results of all the effort have been hugely beneficial. All the pages are now much neater and more readable yet they don’t look substantially different from the older printed versions. I also weeded out a couple of unforgivable spelling errors which had been sitting uncorrected for far too long. And I was able to get rid of the ruled lines that I used to end the captions where the hand-drawn letters didn’t quite fill out the box. One advantage of lettering a pre-existing story is that you can add extra words to the captions, or even rewrite whole sentences. In a few instances I’ve been able add in more of the adjectives that were omitted to save space, so that some of the pages now have more of Lovecraft’s text than they had before.

This week I’m back at work on The Dunwich Horror which is now proceeding without my having to worry about the lettering. Further updates will follow.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive