Lettering is the hardest easy thing I have ever done.

Yes, I realize that last sentence is an oxymoron, but stick with me here -- as I've said before, lettering is hard, but the really good letterers (one of which I am not) are those who can make it look easy. And maybe, after lettering a few thousand pages across a decade or two, it really is easy. I don't know, and I suspect I may never know. But the point is that lettering is a paradox, in more ways than one.

Someone told me recently that the letterer is to a comic book what the drummer is to a rock band. It's a good analogy, too -- without a drummer, all the beats would still be present in the music, and a good rhythm guitarist could keep time as well as a drummer could, but there would still be something unquantifiably different (and less satisfying) about rock music if drummers were discarded.

Even the most experimental of rock bands rarely exclude drums from their music, for the simple reason that drums are an indispensable part of the art form. There have been "silent" comics made before, and some of them are pretty interesting, but captions and speech balloons have become so synonymous with comics, like drums with rock music, that their presence is always expected (perhaps taken for granted as well, but that's beside the point).

With almost all comics, if the lettering elements were to be removed, the story would fall apart. While the writer and the artist can build a narrative and its visual framework, their work amounts to little more than a storyboard until a letterer steps in and puts the finishing touches on the story.

And hey, I love me some storyboards, but I like finished movies more.

Damn, how many metaphors did I just mix? I think I lost my train of thought (maybe I'm more like a drummer than I've realized).

I'll return to bore you again some other time. In the meantime, check out those awful logos I did!

Evan