Balloonacy at the B.C.R.

This evening the Boston Comics Roundtable did an activity I invented called Balloonacy. It didn’t pan out exactly as I’d imagined since we’d talked so long about how to make the group more active that there wasn’t as much time left for an actual activity. But I think it was fun and productive for those involved.

I started by drawing the classic ellipsoid balloon with a short pointy tail and the letters “B.C.R.” inside. I posited that that’s the comics equivalent of a sentence with a period at the end. It’s a straightforward statement.

Then I challenged folks to draw balloons in which the lettering, punctuation or other marks inside the balloon, balloon shape, tail shape, or some other visual detail would give the letters “B.C.R.” a different meaning and perhaps sound.

The group then drew (in no particular order):

• classic thought balloon.
• dotted whisper balloon.
• balloon with four tails, for four (or more) people speaking simultaneously.
• balloon with nine tails over a cityscape to signal a chorus of millions.
• collage of balloons all saying the same thing.
• fancy letters for ornate speech.
• The Yellow Kid with a message on his nightshirt.
• balloon shaped like a luscious pair of lips.
• burst balloon for shouting.
• scroll-shaped balloon with blackletter/Gothic letters for a town crier.
• three connected balloons each containing one letter for a single, slow, deliberate speaker.
• three separate balloons each containing one letter pointing to a single depressed figure.
• three separated balloons each containing one letter with tails pointing different places to denote three speakers.
• balloon with tail going off the page to an off-panel speaker.
• block letters and block balloon for a carnival barker.
• two forms of white letters dropped out of a black balloon, one with the wavery white border that Todd Klein gave to Dream in Sandman. (We also looked at his Delirium balloons.)
• wavery letters for a spooky voice.
• icicle-dripping balloon for disdain.
• two variations of rebuses spelling out “B.C.R.,” one assigned to a mime.
• balloon with a long, meandering tail suitable for a character who talks and talks without getting to the point.
• balloon containing musical notes as well as letters for singing.
• letters strung out on an undulating musical staff for more singing.
• wavery-bordered balloon with its tail dropping off the bottom of the page where the speaker is collapsing in a faint.
• two balloons, one overlapping the other to show an interruption.
• balloon blocked by the side of a panel as something interrupts.
• vertical balloon containing Japanese kanji sounding approximately like “B.C.R.” 
• huge letters from a loud character flattening other characters.
• tiny, lowercase letters within a big balloon for quiet speech.
• two examples of giant block letters crowding the edges of their balloon.
• square block letters in a squarish balloon for a real square.
• letters drawn within concentric radio waves spreading from an antenna.
• jagged-edged balloon and with a lightning-bolt tail to denote electronic communication.
• big block letters with small exclamation points instead of periods—verging on a sound effect!
• round balloon with no tail for a disembodied or off-panel speaker.
• squarish balloon and lettering for a robot.
• balloon with its tail ending in a starburst against a window—a recent way of showing that someone is speaking inside that building.
• various typographical symbols before the letters to indicate profanity.
• chevrons on either side of the letters and an asterisked footnote to indicate speech in a foreign language (or, some people thought, HTML).
• tailless thought balloon broken up with breath marks to denote psychic communication.
• a long, boring speech wallpapered on the back of a panel.

We also came up with three balloons that not everyone agreed on how to interpret.

• thought balloon with a pointed tail instead of the trail of puffs that thought balloons usually have. Could this indicate thinking aloud?
• three numbered boxes each containing one letter. I didn’t catch the discussion on that one.
• balloon butted up against the edge of a panel. That usually means the same thing as a balloon fully inside a panel—it doesn’t seem to reflect anything more than the available space and the preference of the editor and letterer who place that balloon. But perhaps it could have storytelling significance. Say, one dominant character’s speech balloons are always in the center of a panel and another’s are always crowded to one side.
• word balloon in the shape of a real helium balloon with a knot at the bottom. What might this symbolize?

And that was just balloons. We haven’t yet talked about other ways comics show the invisible.

A Look at Leroy Lettering

Letterer Todd Klein describes using the Leroy tool used regularly on EC horror comics in the 1940s and ’50s. That lettering was done by Jim and Margaret Wroten, occasionally with assistants.

I’d made the common assumption that those letters were produced by some form of typesetting machine, but Klein explains that they were still drawn by hand:

It has a mechanical look, but is actually pen and ink, made with the Leroy lettering system of scriber and templates manufactured by the Keuffel and Esser company, and created for comics almost exclusively by Jim Wroten and his wife Margaret. The Leroy system was intended for technical artists doing things like machine parts diagrams and architectural drawings.

The letterer drew each letter by following a groove in the template.

According to the Tales from the Crypt collection, Jim Wroten was originally a salesman for Keuffel and Esser, which made tools for architectural and drafting firms. Wroten found a market for the Leroy tool in comics when the industry boomed in the early 1940s. In 1945 he and his wife Margaret joined William Moulton Marston’s Wonder Woman team, according to Bhob Stewart at Potrzebie, who apparently interviewed Margaret Wroten in 1996.

Klein thinks the Wrotens had worked on the earliest Wonder Woman pages; perhaps they’d done so as freelancers, or perhaps someone else was using a Leroy template. That’s the problem with Leroy lettering—it has very little individual style.

Max Gaines, publisher of the Wonder Woman magazines at All-American, gave the Wrotens more business when he started Educational/Entertaining Comics, and his son Bill kept them on after suddenly inheriting the firm. By the 1950s, Klein notes, the Wrotens’ system had become more flexible:

By the time of their work in EC Comics, the Wrotens had a variety of Leroy templates to use for different size lettering. They used vertical letters for regular text and a larger size slanted to the right with a thicker pen point for emphasized words. I believe the Wrotens did only the actual lettering, leaving the balloon and caption borders for the artists of the stories. This accounts for the wide variety of balloon shapes and styles at EC in particular.

Though editor Al Feldstein didn’t care for the Leroy style, it fit well with his approach to writing comics: he scripted the stories, laid out the pages, and had the Wrotens insert the text at the tops of the panels. Only then did the pages go to the illustrators to fill with art. Feldstein’s stories often had a lot of text, and the Leroy characters kept that text clearly legible, if characterless.

Bill Willingham on Oz in the Fables Universe

Sequential Tart interviewed writer Bill Willingham, who’s been slowly unrolling some Oz-themed storylines in his Fables comic book:

ST: I have a couple of questions about some of the current storylines. What led to the idea of Bufkin leading a revolution in Oz? Frank L. Baum had some strong political opinions; did that play into at all?

BW: To a certain extent. My reading of the Oz books was woefully antiquated in that I did it early on in life and hadn't revisited them as often as I should. And this is what I found out about Oz readers: Oz readers are fanatical readers. They want things correct. The few dips I've made into the Oz world had readers and some of the people who work in the Fables camp, like Eric Shanower, who has done the odd Fables book, and who, of course, is a massive Oz fan [Shanower writes Oz-themed comics for IDW and Marvel Comics], and Todd Klein, our letterer from day one: massive Oz fan — which apparently is a redundancy. There's no such thing as just a middle-of-the-road Oz fan. They called me out on the tiniest little thing. It is not the Lunchpail Tree; it is the Lunchbox Tree.

I realized that if I wanted to play in Oz at all, which I wanted Bufkin to eventually do again someday, I'd have to either have all my ducks in a row and massively re-immerse myself in the Oz stuff — or create a situation wherein I'm the only expert, [and can say], "Todd, Eric, what you don't understand is that when the Adversary conquered Oz, he made all these changes and all these changes are inscribed only in my mind, so nyah nyah, here's the way it is now, and you're just going to have to live with it."

I decided to go that route, so Bufkin finding that the whole place was conquered and overrun by the gnome king, who, when the big empire fell, continued on with his little local empire. Well, it was obvious that Bufkin, having defeated the djinn and slain Baba Yaga would think, "Overthrow a dinky little side-empire like this? Easy." It almost wrote itself, and it solved the problem of these guys who could so easily point out where I got things wrong.

I suspect Sequential Tart asked about Baum’s “strong political opinions” because he was progressive for his time while Willingham identifies himself as a conservative. But Willingham didn’t address that potential conflict.

I’ve written before about how the Ozma and Dorothy of Willingham’s Fables universe bear little resemblance to Baum’s characters. In contrast, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Sawhorse, and the Glass Cat act quite familiar. As for Bufkin, he’s a true original.

(Hat tip to Blair Frodelius’s Daily Ozmapolitan.)

Gasp! A Short History of Comic-Book Exhalations

Last month master comics letterer Todd Klein looked at the evolution of a form of punctuation unique to comics: breath marks.

Those are little radiating lines—Klein notes they became standardized to three on each side—around certain words in comic-book dialogue. Experienced readers understand that the character doesn’t speak that such a word, nor does it approximate any sound from the character’s mouth.

Rather, the word within breath marks is a label for the sound the character makes and its emotional meaning. Breath marks and the word balloon’s tail are the equivalent of “he sobbed” or “she sighed” or “the whole crowd gasped” in prose.

Using panels from early DC Comics, Klein traces early comic-book letterers’ struggles to show characters’ non-verbal sounds within word balloons. At first they used parentheses—which were also part of how some comics signaled thoughts. But after a few years letterers codified the use of this new punctuation mark.

Letterer Nate Peikos has said that breath marks are also called “cat’s whiskers,” “fireflies,” and “crow’s feet.” On Klein’s blog writer Kurt Busiek offers another alternate term: “roachlegs.” He comments:

I remember working with one editor [Cat Yronwode, this discussion suggests] who insisted that anything that would ordinarily be enclosed in roachlegs be spelled out as a sound, so “gasp” became “H-hh!” or something. [T]he reasoning was that no one in a book or movie would actually say “gasp,” and so such things were comic-booky.

My argument that in books they do it through narration, but comics evolved other methods, and if we were going to shy away from comic-booky things, it was worth noting that in books and movies when people talked, big white ovals with their words in them didn’t appear over their heads, and loud noises didn’t manifest as floating letters, either, fell on deaf ears.

Opinion appears to be divided on how best to signal breath marks in a script:

>cough!< *wheeze* =puff puff=

I recently typed my first *sigh*, but I was trying to match this classic style. I actually prefer the sound-effect approach—more showing than telling.

A Complete History of the Robin Logo

Many months back, the weekly Robin linked to master letterer Todd Klein’s essay on the unusual longevity of the logo for Robin magazine, which lasted (with one minor change) on magazines featuring the Tim Drake character from 1991 to 2009.

This fall Klein offered a complete study of logos for Robin, including the original medievalist lettering, the mix of the Boy Wonder’s name with the Batman symbol, casting about for an independent symbol in the 1970s, and finally the Robin magazines. See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. There was also a bonus posting on how Jerry Robinson also designed the Batman logo.

Klein himself designed the logo for the new Tim Drake magazine, Red Robin, based on the Robin logo. And in another informative post he traces the entire design process, with alternate versions and creative dead ends.

The High Cost of Relettering

Like movie studios and music companies, comic-book publishers reissue their most popular material in "boxed sets" with a little extra material and a much bigger price. DC Comics has a series it calls Absolute, as in Watchmen: The Absolute Edition and the Absolute Sandman series. The comics' pages are reproduced larger than originally printed, on better paper, with extras.

The reissue process required extra work for one spin-off from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Absolute Death. (Death is the Sandman's sister, and just the cutest thing.) As letterer Todd Klein explained on his blog: "Neil and the DC staffers involved felt the lettering on these issues reproduced so badly when enlarged it was worth having me redo it."

So like a movie being remastered or an album being remixed, the Death: The High Cost of Living miniseries is being spruced up with the latest technology. While relettering the whole story on his computer, Klein has improved line breaks, reshaped a balloon that had been rendered asymmetric, and made other small changes.

This project also required Klein to create a new variant font:

In his script, Neil directed: “The Eremite’s lettering style should be just a little smaller and skinnier than normal: try and give the impression that he always talks very, very quietly.” To get that, I made the letterforms very narrow, with thin strokes. Unfortunately, some of them were just beyond the limits of the printing process, and not helped by poor pencil clean-ups before being photostatted by DC.

Now, the rest of the issues used standard Klein lettering, for which I’ve long had computer fonts, but this style is one I’ve never needed to do on the computer until now. So, yesterday I spent about eight hours making new fonts: TKondensed in Roman, Italic and Bold Italic faces.

The result is supposed to be an improved book--but at the same time unnoticeably so.

Old Ladies Applying Brown Paint to Acetate

Todd Klein's blog offers an craftsman's look at how comic books used to be colored. Artist Kevin Nowlan expresses nostalgia for the old ways at Comics Comics.

But the most intriguing aspect of the comics-coloring process, to my eyes, is explained in his coauthor Mark Chiarello's part of The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering, the larger half of the book that covers coloring:

Originally, the colorist only had 63 colors to choose from, but in the 1970s the list was expanded to 124 colors. The actual coloring was fun, because it was a lot like filling in a coloring book when you were a kid, only you got paid for it (remember, that's very important!).

Then came the tedious and somewhat baffling part: In order for the separator to discern exactly what colors the colorist wanted, he had to write down short codes for every color on the guides. If he chose a specific green, for example, that was the only way to make sure that exact shade of green made it onto the printed comic page. Each color on the chart had a corresponding code, and the coloring wasn't complete until the colorist coded the stack of photocopies. . . .

At this point, the colorist handed in these color guides to the editor and got paid for the work. A few months later, the colorist got to see the fruits of his or her labor when the printed comic hit the stands. Most colorists had very little idea of how their painted and coded guides got from that stage to the final publication.

Here's how it worked: The comic book company's production department would send out the coloring guides and original art boards to their separator, where a group of old ladies would sit around applying dark brown paint to acetate copies of the artwork. I swear, it's true!

A room full of women who were making minimum wage would darken in four sheets of acetate for each comic book page. Using the colorist's original color guides as a roadmap, they would apply varying shades of the dark brown paint to the clear acetate, making camera-ready film that could then be photographed onto four metal printing plates. The four sheets would correspond to the four colors required for printing: one each for yellow, magenta, cyan, and black.

Nowadays colorists work on computers with digital files, and can produce a much wider range of colors and various atmospheric effects. Look at, for instance, the work of Paolo Lamanna in the Artemis Fowl graphic novel, one of last year's Cybils winners.

Separations are still an important technical step before printing, but that process too is handled on computers. More fine jobs lost to technology.

Robin: A Logo to Be Reborn?

Confirming rumors discussed back here, DC Comics has announced that the issues of Robin and Nightwing to ship in February 2009 will be the last. For a while. Most fans are sure that those magazines will be relaunched at some point in the future, perhaps with new #1 (collectible!) issues.

As I noted earlier, those magazines' sales fall in the middle of the pack for DC superheroes--perhaps disappointing given that "Robin" and "Dick Grayson" are household names. Newsarama reported that sales were 32,000 for Robin and a bit over 50,000 copies for Nightwing in September--but that was during a highly hyped crossover called "Batman RIP."

To shake up the Batman stories, it appears that in 2009 Dick Grayson and Tim Drake may give up their Nightwing and Robin roles, possibly taking on others (even that of Batman?). But eventually Bruce Wayne will return, and the DC universe will be whole once more.

A more likely casualty than any of the Robin characters is the Robin logo. Originally developed for the first Robin miniseries published back in 1991 (and collected in Robin: A Hero Reborn), it's remained basically unchanged. In 2007, DC dropped the oval behind the R on some issues, but the letters are the same.

That's quite unusual, as master letterer and logo-designer Todd Klein acknowledged on his blog last year:

Having the same R on the logo and the [Robin] costume makes it a good “brand” logo, useful for character recognition and marketing, so that’s one reason why it’s still around, though I don’t know if it’s still on the costume. [The R on Robin's chest changed when Tim changed to a mostly red costume, as shown to the right, but the logo's spiky R stayed the same.]

It’s a logo that continues to look contemporary to me, not dated at all. One reason logos change is to bring in a more modern style. Another common reason these days is to herald a new direction for the character, a new creative team, a new number one issue. This logo really seems a good fit for the character, some characters never find one. (Aquaman comes to mind.)

Robin’s logo meets the four basic criteria I think are crucial for a good comics logo: READABILITY, STRENGTH, APPROPRIATENESS and ORIGINALITY.

Klein's study of the Batman logo through the decades came in five parts to cover all the changes. In fact, there have been at least five variations for Batman since the Robin logo appeared. Klein's comments on those changes and his other logo studies go into great detail; after all, he wrote the book on comics lettering and logo design (well, he wrote the half of the DC book that covers those topics).