With over a decade in the comics industry, Blambot’s award-winning typographer, letterer, and graphic designer Nate Piekos has created more than 300 fonts. We see many of these fonts every day, though we may not realize it as we surf the internet, play video games, shop for products, skip through ads, and, of course, read…
Balloons vs. Bubbles: The Semi-definitive Word on Comic Lettering Capsules
Earlier in the year, comics critic and creator Claire Napier reached out into the Twitter-verse to request an answer to an important comics question:
By the Letters: Taylor Esposito Has Big Plans for 2020
Taylor Esposito ended 2019 with more than 1,300 issues to his credit as a letterer, and has hopes to do lots more for the new year. Drawing on his years of experience as a graphic designer, moving on to the Marvel Bullpen, and then achieving his dream by becoming a staff letterer at DC Comics,…
A Gathering of Letterers
If you’ve been following By the Letters since the series inception early this year, you know that I’ve been spotlighting the fine art of comic book lettering and have featured a few interviews with letterers, including Ariana Maher. We’re a big fan of roundtables at WWAC, so I asked Maher if she’d help me get…
Letterers: Jill Gerber on the Unsung Heroes of Comics in the Classroom
When it comes to using comics in the classroom, letterers are truly the unsung heroes of the medium, according to educator Jill Gerber. In our earlier Comics Academe interview focusing on how the use of comics has evolved as a literary teaching tool, Gerber, an award-winning educator and consultant, explains that lettering is one of…
Into the Letter-Verse: Blambot’s Nate Piekos Talks Lettering in Comic Book Movies
In our previous interview, Nate Piekos shared his processes and passions within the world of comic book lettering. He also expressed his disappointment in a recent superhero movie that clearly had not consulted a professional comic book letterer to ensure the authenticity of their film’s comic book aesthetic. The film Piekos was referring to is,…
By the Letters: Blambot’s Nate Piekos
An incredible amount of work and attention to detail goes into lettering a comic that the average reader is likely not aware of, despite the fact that it is the lettering of a comic that can help guide the reading experience from panel to panel. Nate Piekos has been working in comics lettering, typography, and…
BOOM! Bar: Licenses, Lettering, and Letting Go
BOOM! Bar! Where we talk about the month’s BOOM!, KaBOOM!, BOOM! Box, and Archaia releases, try to spot trends, and think about what BOOM! “is,” as a publisher. Remember last month, when I wondered about how letterers get attached to projects at BOOM! and their substudios? Well, I got some answers. So let’s start with…
The Spire: Lettering Is Art
Out of all the elements that come together to make a comic book, lettering may be the most subtle. It’s meant to supplement the writer’s work by capturing character voice, setting the story’s pace, and, obviously, putting the words on the page in the first place. Many suggest that the best lettering is invisible, but…
