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Friday, September 3, 2010
Comic Crafting with Richard Starkings
A conversations with Caleb Gerard
Comic Crafting with Richard Starkings
a conversation with Caleb Gerard
Initially I was worried about this interview, I mean this guy, Richard Starkings, letters comicbooks. I have been aware that this is a skill that I don’t have since I lettered my own story a couple of years ago but also know that it is specialized, so was concerned that this would be a one-trick interview.
And again I was wrong.
Richard Starkings IS primarily known in the comicbook industry as a premier letterer and head-honcho of Comicraft the standard setting lettering studio. But, as you’ll see below, he has his hands in just about everything else that this industry can do.
I’m not going to list his credits here other than to say that his (or his associate’s or ex-associates) lettering appears in comics from DC, Marvel, Image, MAD and quite a few other places and it would be impossible to go to a comic store on “new comic day” and not find a few comics with the Comicraft name in the credits.
(Let me take a minute to remind you that you are more than welcome to comment on the interview after you’re done, but you have to be a registered member to do so.)
Anyhow, take a gander at what we discussed:
Caleb Gerard (CWN): You are on a new role of late, as publisher. Tell me about this lettering book you are putting out.
Richard Starkings (RS): Not such a new role, really -- aside from the oft forgotten fact that I’ve been publishing comic book font software incredibly successfully for eight years now -- I’ve been self-publishing since I was 17. Back in the days of Duplicator Machines I put together four issues of a DOCTOR WHO fanzine with a friend at school and later a mini comic of cartoons I’d created for a whole bunch of different, longer lasting, DOCTOR WHO magazines.
COMIC BOOK LETTERING THE COMICRAFT WAY had kind of written itself over the course of the last ten years. We’ve been hiring and training Comicraftsmen long enough to have generated quite a bit of inhouse training material, and last year we tutored a dozen students as part of MCAD’s online course in comic book creation.  We used a HIP FLASK short story Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen had created for us (as part of a deal we made with the GORILLA comics guys in exchange for their website) as instructional material and in the process of teaching the students John ‘JG’ Roshell (Comicraft’s Secret Weapon) and I realized that we had accumulated enough Tips and Tricks and illustrative HIP FLASK material... To fill a book!
CWN So, you’re training future competition?
RS: I created a newsletter by the name of BALLOON TALES “For the information & education of comic book letterers everywhere” way back in 1993 I think. The newsletter was an FAQ answering all the questions asked of me by Todd Klein, Chris Eliopoulos, Jack Morelli, Jim Novak, John Costanza et al. At one point in the early nineties I was getting at least one call a week from fearful hand letterers who thought I was about to put them all out of business and I would sometimes spend two hours on the phone discussing the pros and cons of digital lettering. I put everything in one newsletter so that I could save myself some time. The newsletter became our informational website, http://www.balloontales.com/ which we used as source material for our online course at MCAD, which we are now using as source material for the book. So, in actual fact, we’ve been training lettering artists throughout the world for ten years now — we get letters of thanks from letterers in countries like Spain, Finland, Australia and even the Arab Emirates. Passing on the information and knowledge JG and I have acquired in Balloon Tales is our way of passing the torch that was passed to me by the British letterers — specifically Bill Nuttall and Tom Frame -- who answered my questions nearly twenty years ago. Helping out young hopefuls as well as your colleagues and contemporaries is something we’ve always regarded as a responsibility, and by doing so we have always learned more and consequently Comicraft has continuously grown and risen to meet new challenges.
CWN What can you tell the readers about the future of your on-line lettering classes.
RS: If we can fit another class in this year or next, I’m sure we’ll happily do so. But an hour a week of thinking and typing and handling (one or two) problem students all at the same time is time-consuming and exhausting work. JG does all the really hard work preparing course material and grading and advising students, but it takes the two of us to juggle the online class responsibilities effectively.
CWN Introduce our readers to J.G. since you referred to him as your “secret weapon” he seems to deserve some recognition.
RS: But then he wouldn’t be a secret, now would he? Well, all right, just between you and me... I hired JG fresh out of UCLA eleven years ago and both of us thought of his work with me as a stop gap job while he waited on a career break in the real world. After a few months, his part time position became full time and after a year we moved out of the backroom of my apartment and into an actual office. JG pushed me out of Quark Xpress and into Illustrator and was pretty much responsible for setting the standard for all the methods and processes of digital lettering which are taken for granted in the comic book industry today. He’s also the fontmeister of comicbookfonts.com... The guy who took samples of my hand lettering and made it look way better than it ever deserved. JG is the wunderkind, the master of the house. I, the janitor, nothing more than a drunken old hack grumbling noisily about “Kids today” to anyone who’ll listen. I still have my rotring pens, you know...
Check out JG’s portfolio of “Unique Designs” over at http://www.comicraft.com/ and I think you’ll be surprised at how much of a contribution he’s made to some of the biggest and best comic books of the last ten years.
CWN “Hip Flask” was just a mascot but you’ve actually given him a story.
RS: Every time I hear people refer to Hip as a “mascot” I think of spotty, bespectacled graduate students wrapped in their college scarves on UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE sitting next to a stuffed toy that they refer to as their “mascot.” Your British readers over thirty-five know what I mean. I never thought for a minute that HIP FLASK was just a shill, I commissioned short stories from my old friend Simon Furman way back in 1996, with a mind to creating a series of one page stories rather like the HARRIS TWEED strips by John Ryan that used to appear in EAGLE.  We posted a three page HIP strip on the Active Images website in early 1997, around the same time Hip was appearing in ads for our growing library @ comicbookfonts.com. The ads caught readers’ eyes because I was lucky enough to get some terrific illustrations from artists I’ve worked with over the years — starting with Brian Bolland, of course (whose beautiful HIP FLASK piece graces the cover of our COMICRAFT WAY book), and then Jae Lee, Jim Lee, Stephen Platt, Brent Anderson, Tim Sale and my grate mate, Ian Churchill who ended up creating almost a dozen pages of strip for me (eight of them also appear in the lettering book).
CWN So, he’s your mascot (for the non-English readers like me) by accident then?
RS: HIP FLASK was originally the name of a very human, stereotypical private eye I created for inclusion in my cartoon strip HEDGE BACKWARDS http://www.hedgebackwards.com/ . However, I got so tied up with Comicraft, HEDGE fell by the wayside, and Flask never even got to appear in the strip. A couple of years later, after my efforts to secure either the X-Men or Wildcats to promote Comicraft fonts came to naught, I decided to give the job to HEDGE instead. But HEDGE BACKWARDS was such a personal strip, pretty much detailing my life and loves in California, I quickly realized that it was not an appropriate vehicle for promoting fonts such as "Clobberintime!", "Phasesonstun" or "Comicrazy". Hedge didn't carry a phaser and wasn't into Clobbering in a big way, so I started casting around for another, more suitable salesman. While I was looking through my HEDGE BACKWARDS sketches, I found my original drawing of HIP FLASK and proudly announced to my lovely wife, Youshka, that I'd found a character to promote our line of fonts. She liked the name, but, when I told her he was a private detective, innocuously asked me what made him different to any other PI. "Oh, Er..." I said, thinking quickly, "He's, um..., he's Hip, he's a -- He's A Hippopotamus!" She liked the idea, and it stuck. I later abandoned his PI identity when I became aware of the existence of the Australian character HAIRBUTT THE HIPPO, PRIVATE EYE.
CWN What in the world made you think that a comic about a sentient hippo would work?
RS: What in the world made Bob Kane think a man dressed as a bat would work? Can you imagine him describing his idea to friends at parties? “It’s about a man who wears a mask, and blue underpants over gray tights, and he takes revenge on criminals!”  Mark Gruenwald used to say that there are no bad characters or concepts, only bad execution. The Hulk is just a big green gorilla, after all, and the Thing is a man made of rocks. When you boil established comic book characters down to their bare bones, none of them are very interesting really, but we accept them because they were around when we were young and we love ‘em. J. Scott Campbell adores Thundercats, GI JOE and TRANSFORMERS, and why wouldn’t he -- they were toys and TV shows when he was seven?
Ladronn and I talked at length about the preconceptions and prejudices we were facing when we set about telling the story of HIP FLASK. It was Ladronn’s desire to create a very dark story that would chase away people’s light-hearted reaction to the concept of a walking, talking hippo, a concept which makes everyone laugh, no matter what. Not many people seem to realize that hippos in the wild have killed more people than lions and crocodiles put together. They’re fiercely territorial and have been known to bite people, and crocodiles, in half just for being there. They can also move at about 30 miles per hour and will flatten you if you get between them and the water.
Both Ladronn and I were teenagers when movies like ALIEN, BLADERUNNER and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS were in theaters and we wanted to capture the same thrills of excitement and fear we felt when watching those movies in the story of HIP FLASK.
CWN Sounds like you took some time to familiarize yourself with your source material…  Do you think this kind of research might benefit the image of “comics are for kids” that stigmatizes the comicbook industry?
RS: Comics ARE for kids! That’s not to say that adults shouldn’t read them, but I’m firmly of the opinion that if we want a healthy comic book industry, the kind of projects we should be selling are titles that have more in common with SAMURAI JACK and THE POWERPUFF GIRLS than they do with The Great American Novel. We’ve aimed HIP FLASK at a teenage readership because both Ladronn and I enjoyed comics the most when we were in our mid-teens.
CWN Have you always wanted to write?
RS: That’s one of those questions you always get asked when you’ve specialized in one discipline at the expense of another. Alison Gill, head of production at DC comics told me last week that -- even though I regard my roles as designer and digital letterer as production disciplines -- she still thinks of me as editorial, because we worked together for five years at Marvel UK when I was an editor. At a Buddhist meeting recently I was introduced as a cartoonist because my Buddhist friends are familiar with my strip, HEDGE BACKWARDS which ran in the national Buddhist newspaper, WORLD TRIBUNE, for a couple of years.  If you know my name because of its appearance in comics in America, then you think of me as a lettering artist — and an extremely busy one at that.
I’ve always wanted to write, and I’ve always written. I’ve written — and illustrated — hundreds of my own cartoon strips, and I wrote for all the comics Marvel UK published while I was working there, including TRANSFORMERS, GI JOE, GHOSTBUSTERS, DOCTOR WHO and ZOIDS. My first strip, for ZOIDS, was illustrated by Steve Parkhouse of BOJEFFRIES and SANDMAN fame. The last Marvel book I wrote was an issue of SHE HULK, illustrated by young Bryan Hitch who I dragged kicking and screaming from England to the world of Marvel comics in America whether he could meet a deadline or not!
Have I always wanted to write big noisy superhero strips? “No.”
CWN So, the answer would be that you’ve always written then… What is wrong with “superhero strips”?
RS: I don’t think there is anything wrong with them, but the comics and strips which interested me as a child — EAGLE, COUNTDOWN, 2000AD and THE TRIGAN EMPIRE — were adventure stories that sprang from science fiction concepts. I used to love reading THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SPIDER-MAN and the FANTASTIC FOUR stories which ran in Marvel UK’s MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL, but I have much more fondness for the strips originated in England, which rarely focused on adolescent power fantasies but played with science fiction concepts and ideas instead.
CWN Why are you only doing an issue here and an issue there for the HIP FLASK concept?
RS: I’m at the mercy of Ladronn, who creates perhaps one painted page a week. Of course, he doesn’t produce finished pages one at a time, he pencils the pages, then inks them, then spends a couple of months coloring. But, by and large, he averages a page a week. And they’re worth waiting for, let’s be honest. Alan Davis used to tell me that spending a lot of time on a page doesn’t guarantee the quality, only the polish. In Ladronn’s case, I’d say that his spending a lot of time actually does guarantee the quality.  Our second issue, ELEPHANTMEN, ships in July, one year after the first. It’s beautiful. Stunning.
CWN Would you consider having “fill-in” artists between the Ladronn masterpieces?
RS: It’s not really possible, because Ladronn is working on one long story. Chris Bachalo is working on a HIP FLASK story written by Joe Kelly; CAPTAIN STONEHEART & THE TRUTH FAIRY, but it’s a very different kind of story, believe me.
CWN Can we expect some more original comics from either you or your studio?
RS: Not until this particular HIP story is wrapped up in a couple of years or so. After that, I’d love to continue telling stories about HIP FLASK.
CWN Do you think you’ll be working with another writer again as you have with Joe Casey on the HIP FLASK books or flying solo? And not to take anything away from Casey but why are you not doing all the writing yourself?
RS: In one sense, I am writing this myself. It’s my story and the rhythm and pacing of the story is built from my story ideas and thumbnails. I like working with Joe because he comes to the story with a fresh --and a very American -- perspective. His script for UNNATURAL SELECTION was dry and bitter and stark and enabled us to establish a tone which I would have found difficult to capture. Joe is the Captain Kirk to my Doctor McCoy and Ladronn’s Spock. While Ladronn and I are arguing over all the logistics and the human elements of the story, Joe’s looking to get in and out, preferably with the prettiest girls in the room on his arms.
CWN You’ve acquired the rights to collect an older Tundra property “Strange Embrace”, give us some more information on this…
RS: When I was working for Marvel UK on the ZOIDS comic, my old pal Kev Hopgood was pencilling four pages a week, but found that he couldn’t ink them and still meet the weekly deadline. Kev brought in a mate by the name of Dave Hine, who inked a couple of pages of Kev’s pencils and did an amazing, bang-up job. Dave was, and still is, a sweet, sweet guy who (at the time) dressed and spoke as if he was the sixth member of Duran Duran. He never missed a deadline and never complained about any of the work we foisted on him. A couple of years after I moved from London to LA I saw his name on a black and white book from TUNDRA UK. Looking inside I was astounded and amazed by Dave’s artwork inside. To my shame, I’d never thought of Dave as an artist in his own right.  To my astonishment, I discovered in the course of the next four months that Dave was an incredible storyteller and STRANGE EMBRACE quickly became one of my all-time favorite comics of all time! Even though I hung onto my original copies, I wondered why no one had ever collected it into trade paperback. Eventually, after reading Larry Young’s inspiring book on indy publishing, TRUE FACTS, I decided, what the hell, I’ll track Dave down and I’LL collect it. Dave, bless him, had hung on to ALL the artwork and was still looking forward to the day when someone would indeed put it out as a single trade.
If you’re not familiar with STRANGE EMBRACE, it’s a story that might sit on the same shelf as FROM HELL. It’s the story of a psycho-sexual, modern/Victorian gothic supernatural tortured romance — a tense thriller that makes THE RING look like a fairy tale. As X-STATIX scribe Pete Milligan says in his introduction to the book, “Prepare to be Shocked!”
CWN The Ring scared the bejeezus out of the wife and I, you’re saying this will be even more so…?
RS: Everyone I know who has read the book has been chilled by the experience. I kid you not. And Dave is such a sweet guy...
CWN You’re also re-publishing an autobiographical strip by Al Davison about his struggles with spina bifida and M.E., sounds heavy…
RS: I was talking to Al just before Christmas in regard to a font we were creating for him. He lamented to me that he couldn’t find a publisher to reprint his autobiographical book, THE SPIRAL CAGE. Before I really thought about what it might entail, I offered to publish it for him.  I’d read it myself when Titan Books published it in England and was encouraged and inspired by his honest account of living a life with disability and his total commitment to Buddhist practice. Al is an incredible character with a wicked sense of humor. THE SPIRAL CAGE is an inspiring piece of work, not only because it chronicles the struggle, the pain, rejection and prejudice that all “disabled” people like Al face on a daily basis, but because of the intriguing graphic narrative Al has created to tell his story. This edition is revised and expanded by Al and we’re publishing it in North America for the first time.
CWN This is the 2nd time you’ve mentioned Buddhism… are you, in fact, a Buddhist?
RS: Yes, I was introduced to the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin by John Carnell, co-creator of THE SLEEZE BROTHERS. I’ve been practising Buddhism now for fifteen years.
CWN Then there is the other ex-Tundra book, Ilya’s “Skidmarks”, what can you share about what this will be? Are there other Tundra titles that you’ll be bringing back?
RS: I’ve described this book to friends in America as LOVE AND ROCKETS meets Fish’n’Chips, and to English friends as KES for bicycle enthusiasts. It’s just a coincidence that both STRANGE EMBRACE  and SKIDMARKS were published by Tundra — just as it’s a coincidence that all three trades we’re publishing begin with ‘S’. I knew Ilya from his work in at Harrier Comics and he had been at art college with my assistant editor at Marvel, Helen Stone. Ilya drew a few episodes of GHOSTBUSTERS for us and got in touch with me last year for an article in THE FACE magazine. We got talking and I dug up my copies of SKIDMARKS and before I really thought about what it might entail...
CWN What did it entail, Richard?
RS: A lot of hard work and the spending of a lot of money. Successful independent publishers like Larry Young, Jeff Smith and Mike Kunkel AMAZE me!  They’ve established names for themselves and put out quality product in an industry that pays almost all of its attention to the juggernauts — Marvel, DC et al. Putting together just the small line of books I’ve been discussing here is no small feat, I can assure you... And we’re talking here about existing material.
CWN Can you see yourself taking on the role of publisher more and creator less?
RS: From my perspective, publishing is creating.
CWN I really think that this deserves explaining…
RS: If you’re not in print, then drawing comics is just a hobby. Most comic book creators don’t just want to tell stories, they want to reach an audience, and not just the one down the pub Friday night. Whether I’m writing, lettering or publishing I’m helping other creators reach an audience.
CWN You’ve established yourself, and Comicraft, as the premier name in comic book lettering… is this how you saw it shaping up?
RS: No. But I always commit to do my very best and have been fortunate enough to attract people who like to do the same.
CWN What was your earliest lettering job (paid or unpaid)?
RS: I think the first UNPAID work I created was for Harrier Comics, a small independent publisher of amateurish black and white comics in England that enjoyed a short run of success in the early eighties. I lettered FOREST, RAM, ASSASSIN, HMS CONQUEROR and a strip called TALES OF THE RUGGED REPTILE with beautiful art by Cliff Robinson whose work owed a lot to Brian Bolland, so much so that Cliff inevitably went on to work on JUDGE DREDD. My first paid lettering work was a four page strip in a WHIZZER & CHIPS HOLIDAY SPECIAL. Sometime after that I got a break lettering FUTURE SHOCKS for 2000AD and then TRANSFORMERS and FREEFALL WARRIORS for Marvel UK. My first US work was on DETECTIVE COMICS with Alan Davis.
CWN Explain to me the process of how you go about lettering a comic? Do you consult with the writer or editor or is this where your imagination takes off? Or am just asking the question wrong?
RS: You’re just gonna haveta buy a copy of the book, Caleb!
CWN Okay, how ‘bout this, how much collaboration do you, as the letterer, have with the rest of the creative team?
RS: It varies — I work very closely with Jeph Loeb on BATMAN and Jeph & Tim Sale on their projects together. Jeph and Tim have become close friends — I’m working with Tim on an ART OF TIM SALE book we hope to publish later this year — and in many ways working together is our way of hanging out. Chris Bachalo is a very demanding collaborator with some very specific ideas about how lettering should look on his artwork. J Scott Campbell is great fun to work with — also very demanding, but all his requests and ideas are a lot of fun. Joe Casey and I got to know each other when we were working on CABLE — with Ladronn — and Comicraft has lettered pretty much all his books since. There are writers (and presidents and editors in chief) out there who aren’t interested in the lettering — shame on them! Good lettering can improve the look of a badly drawn or badly written book and it can make a well written and well drawn book look great. Working with Kurt Busiek is always a treat because he wants to bring out the best in everyone on his team — and rewards everyone accordingly. He’s one of just two writers I’ve worked with who pay royalties to letterers and colorists (the other being Matt Wagner).
CWN What sparked your interest in comic books?
RS: My eldest brother was a big fan of super hero comics, and I asked my Mum to buy me MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL so that I could be on the same wavelength as my brother. Nevertheless, as I said earlier, I preferred a weekly Sci-Fi comic called COUNTDOWN, which featured the amazing art of John M Burns, Frank Bellamy, Michael Noble, Gerry Haylock and Harry Linfield. The strips were beautifully colored stories based on TV shows like UFO, DOCTOR WHO, THUNDERBIRDS and FIREBALL XL5. After that folded, I followed the artists to another weekly book called LOOK IN which also featured artists like John Bolton, Martin Asbury and Harry North, a brilliant humor artist whose strips were often funnier than the sitcoms on which they were based.  I should also note here that my brother also introduced me to a newspaper strip about a bunch of kids called THE PERISHERS, wonderfully illustrated — and lettered -- by Dennis Collins. Collins’ work was probably the single biggest influence on own.
CWN Where can I find some Dennis Collins?
RS: Pretty soon you’ll find it here: http://www.ThePerishers.org/ When I found out there was very little of Collins work on the web, I started to put a site together... Of course, it’s fallen by the wayside, but I’ll get back to it sometime...
CWN What is missing from comic books today that might be contributing to the decline in readership?
RS: An awareness that the decline in readership is confined to a bunch of comic books that are forty, fifty or sixty years old. My kids are reading DRAGONBALL Z, THE POWERPUFF GIRLS and YU-GI-OH. They love comics, but they don’t read the same books that comic book fans my age are clinging to. Comics should be full of excitement and wonder and action and color. That’s why we started reading them, and that’s why my kids have started reading them. My oldest, who is 8, doesn’t care that SHONEN JUMP is in black and white — he colors it in, just as I used to color the Marvel reprints I read when I was his age. Comics aren’t for collecting, they’re for reading and enjoying, and they should be cheap! “Remember your childhood — and pass it on!”
CWN So some publishers are pricing themselves out?
RS: No, I think publishers are aging themselves out — SHONEN JUMP is $4.95 but kids don’t blink at the price -- a packet of YU GI OH cards costs the same — because it is good value for money.  The stodgy and slow stories some publishers are putting out right now just don’t represent good value for the money for kids or adults. Go back and look at the books Marvel and DC were putting out in the sixties — they were packed with story, action and fun reading... Can you say that about the books they publish today?
CWN There was some recent news that your workload with one of the larger companies was cut back, can you comment on why this happened?
RS: As a matter of fact, Comicraft’s workload with a major comic book company is just about to increase! Of course, if I told you the details, I’d have to kill you.
CWN I think I’m willing to risk this and the readers will be curious (but I’ll be sure to up my insurance tonight).
RS: And lock your windows. But I’m still not telling.
CWN What is the 1st thing you want to tell people who think that lettering is easy?
RS: It is.
CWN Okay, bluntly put, why then should someone pay you to do it?
RS: For the same reason the Lakers hire Shaq. Anyone can put a ball in a basket, but there are only a handful of people that can do it with style.
CWN What is the “must-read” comic book for you each month? Or do you still read monthly comics?
RS: I read Paul Grist’s love letter to British comics, JACK STAFF. We don’t letter that one.
CWN So, do you read the scripts for the books you (or your studio) letter? If so, which do you really look forward to getting?
RS: I look forward to Tim Sale’s pages. Tim is unique, no one else is drawing like Tim and Tim draws like no one else. Carlos Pacheco’s work on ARROWSMITH is fantastic, and Kurt has created a book that’s a lot of fun — the kind of comic I’d have loved as a teenager. ASTRO CITY and WILDCATS are books I always like to read, and I have enormous respect for the work Jeph Loeb is doing with Jim Lee on BATMAN right now. It’s a book that’s fun to read and is just as accessible to my eight year old son as it is to Jeph’s fourteen year old (and me... shhh, don’t tell any of my English friends that I read a superhero comic book about a man in tights). Just about anything edited by Axel Alonso is worth reading, I think Axel is the most talented editor working in comics right now. I think the two most interesting writers in comics right now are Geoff Johns and Joe Kelly. Where do those guys get all their ideas?
CWN What is the best part about living in Southern California for you?
RS: Walking in the Rain. In England, I experienced way too much rain. Here, it happens so rarely, I love it.
CWN This is the part of the interview that we all look forward to, you, the subject, gets to cover what I, the interviewer, foolishly left out.
RS: Aside from the trade paperbacks and the COMICRAFT WAY book, I’m particularly proud of the European editions of HIP FLASK: UNNATURAL SELECTION which are being published in France, Germany and Spain in June.  We revised and expanded the first issue of HIP by adding an enhanced double page spread (which Ladronn had originally drawn as a single panel), 12 pages from the second issue and also paintings of Hip which Ladronn created over two years ago as warm ups and a brand-spanking new wraparound cover. I should also point out that Ladronn creates all the art for HIP FLASK on artboard marked with the European dimensions which are considerably wider than the boards designed for the dimensions of a US comic. In a sense, the US edition was HIP FLASK in Pan & Scan format and the European books are in Widescreen format — revealing art only seen before on our CD-Rom.
I put all the editions together myself, keeping the lettering for each volume on a separate layer so that they can be printed on the same presses with the lettering for each language added as a fifth (black) ink. The total print run for the European hardcover editions is an amazing 12,500 copies to sell at 12 Euros each. 48 pages of Ladronn’s HIP FLASK art from cover-to-cover in an over-sized hardcover book, it’s a dream come true.
It is apparent that this is not your daddy’s letterer. Between publishing, creating and contributing, I’d say that Richard is in contention for comic’s busiest creator.
I can not begin to express my thanks to Richard for taking the time for this piece and supplying some really cool images to go with it, head-and-shoulders above what I expected or even asked for.
Again, if you’re interested in Richard’s methods drop by COMICRAFT for more info (you’ll find a really cool “secret origin” story on the site). And if you want to order any of the books talked about in the piece to go Active Images and you’ll find them all there.
Caleb Gerard
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
