I have to wonder if our bevy of modern conveniences has made us somewhat lazy and unobservant. There was a time when the visual representation of a language was an artform - each letter a graceful network of lines and angles, lovingly applied with ink and delicate concern onto communications made of actual paper. Your handwriting would be a passageway into your innermost personality quirks, revealed by the implied motions of your hands and your approach to the creation of the page. Oh, and people had also not yet forgotten how to spell simple words. Those must have been glorious times, when people didn’t pluralize things with apostrophes at every turn. Surely, I’d have 50% less anger-induced aneurysms.

Almost universally, the handwritten letter has been relegated to a place of fanciful romance, and our appreciation of the written alphabet has declined significantly. Of course it would, with the prevalence of digital forms of communication - if you can hit a key and get a perfectly readable letter ‘N’, why wouldn’t you? It’s an amazing convenience! Moveable type, and everything that evolved form it, is absolutely one of the most crucial human inventions, and one I’m endlessly appreciative for - but I really don’t think that Johannes Gutenberg had ‘OMG R U 4 RL?’ in mind. But now, when we have fonts to emote for us, and e-mail to communicate for us, who has time for the written letter? Not even my beloved comic books use hand-lettering anymore, and as an amateur digital letterer, I’d like to thank the Mighty God of Type (I call him Type-Lor the Fontastic) for the hours that he saved me. Hitting the backspace key is like a glorious symphony compared to the soul-rending work of correction fluid and complete re-alignment of every element on the page.

Still, in creating a comic, there are a lot of places where you need to put big words on buildings, or draw in giant sound effects. Many artists leave these sections blank on their pages, and treat them as if they were just part of the digital text that their artists will enter later - and in many instances, these digital add-ons never look right to me. Some of the best comic art tends to disguise its own creation, and a misplaced-looking element will take you right out of the story. This is why I decided to go back to my typography studies and hand-letter any non-dialogue parts of my comics. This was never made more clear than the recent ‘Lying in the Gutters’ column over on CBR, in which a certain Nightwing panel never really got finished, leaving the whole creative team looking a bit foolish. Third panel. Wayne Enterprises needs a new designer.

Thankfully, as I approached my team’s film noir, robo-cehpalopod drama comic, I already had a significant store of vintage typography and logo books I’d been accumulating over the years. I only have a small amount of training in the art of typography (which is still important, but only for purposes of inciting people to buy things), and I have a cursory knowledge of the parts of a letter and why I should give a damn about them. In those days before computers, we had a beautiful collection of fonts for all purposes - none of which we see in regular use anymore. Like all trends of art and style, most of these vintage fonts have been phased out for more dynamic, forceful, or futuristic letterforms - but they’re damned charming, and they look great in an anachronistic crime scene.

And, as an added bonus, creating variations on the letterforms exempts you from having to pay royalties to the creator of the font. Of course, you need to know something about the mechanics of the page and the tendencies of the eye as it scans across a page, but when you happen to be a no-budget, working-from-your-cramped-bedroom comic artist, it’s well worth it. It’s not plagiarism when you create an artistic take of an artistic take on the alphabet. That font’s creator probably did the same thing.

So, the stack of typography books is a collection with a use, and when you find yourself collecting something, it had better be beautiful or utile - otherwise, you might find yourself severely over-collected. Another great source for older letterforms are older magazines and album covers. I’m finding myself snipping things to pieces just to capture the unique letters therein. Even if I don’t have a whole alphabet (which is curiously omitted from a handful of pages in even the lettering manuals), the absent letterforms can usually be implied by similar letters and a bit of formal conjecture - so even fragmented collections can prove useful.

Even if you’re not writing ‘ZOOM!’ in 6-inch tall letters across a page - which, might I add, would make your 3rd quarter profit reports a lot more exciting.

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Article Tags: fonts, handwriting, letterforms, moveable type, typography, vintage

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, flea market finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.