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,…
Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren #1: How Ben Solo Got Swole-o
I know you’re here for Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren #1, but have you heard about CATS? Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster of a musical based on TS Eliot’s charming cat poems was just made into a film by director Tom Hooper (Les Miserables, The King’s Speech), to a slew of incredible critical pans…
As We Say Goodbye to Giant Days, John Allison Introduces Us to Steeple
As I write, Giant Days is one day away from its final issue. A four-year telling of a three-year period that came hot on the heels of (and partially concurrent with) webcomic stories that creator Allison has been working on since 1998, as well as anther BOOM! title, By Night, Giant Days was a phenomenon…
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…
Lettering Inspirations and Approach with Caitlin Yarsky
Caitlin Yarsky isn’t a comic book letterer by profession, but it was her lettering as much as her spectacular illustrations in Coyotes from Image Comics that caught my eye. In fact, her unique lettering style is what prompted my recent hyper focus on the art of comic book lettering in this “By the Letters” series. Typically,…
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,…
Thank You, Text: Letterer Ariana Maher Never Stops Learning
When Ariana Maher first started testing the waters of professional comic lettering, the excitement of seeing her work published was undermined by a few people who felt that exposure ought to have been enough to satisfy her. Now that she has more experience in the field, she knows better when it comes to establishing terms…
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…
By the Letters: An Interview with Troy Peteri
Letterers are some of the many unsung heroes that help shape the comics we love. Word and thought balloons, sound effects (SFX), and narrative boxes appear throughout the pages of each book, but readers tend to take those storytelling devices for granted, without realizing just how much of our reading experience those seemingly simple letters…
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 Complete The Killer: The Craft of Pasting Ethics Over Action
The Complete The Killer Matz and Luc Jacamon, translated by Matz and Edward Gauvin, with lettering by Marshall Dillon (Chapters 1-10) and Deron Bennett (Chapters 11-13) Archaia for BOOM! Studios The Complete The Killer (RRP $39.99) is unbelievably long. Unreasonably, as a PDF—my internet’s not great, but even so—it took a full hour to load…