Panel 1: Here, you can kinda see the lurking wonkiness of my hand lettering, both in terms of the unevenly sized font and also the erratic spacing between lines of dialogue. These worsening flaws reached a head in Empowered vol.12, the original art—and lettering!—for which I completed and sent off almost exactly one year ago. (Ouch.) For example, Deathmonger's dialogue font in vol.12 was supposed to be wavy and even because, well, she's dead and doesn't enunciate perfectly; however, as almost all of my hand lettering is already wavy and even, the Superdead speech pattern didn't quite stand out as intended.

Going forward, I'm gonna have to switch over to "manga-style" lettering, in that I'll be drawing word balloons on the original art that will have to be filled in with software-based lettering afterward. This might seem like a minor point, but I was trained as a letterer at the Joe Kubert School to generate word balloons based very closely on the exact shape of the "text block" of dialogue within 'em, an approach which I have used ever since for most of the last 40-odd years of comics production. (Ouch, again.)

Note that I'll be drawing the word balloons directly onto future comics' original pages because A) "in-artwork" balloons cover up huge swaths (swathes?) of background art that would otherwise have to be drawn, which is far too precious a form of worktime savings to be eschewed; and B) I trust modern-era comics letterers about as far as I can throw 'em, with their word-balloon placements and balloon-tail tendencies often being too perilous for me to abide. (More on this matter later, including an explanation of how thoroughly I was spoiled with the lettering on my early comics.)

Today’s Patreon update: Originally done as a means of scratching out more worktime to complete the long-gestating Empowered vol. 12, I've switched over to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday Patreon posting schedule that won't feature the fixed content format I previously used. However, my vast archive of years of Patreon posts—extensive Empowered previews, vintage con sketches, work stages on covers, "damsel in distress" commissions, life drawings & much, much more—remains available for Patrons' perusal.

-Adam Warren