Insufferable Week Four: Thank You, Adobe

May 23, 2012

Insufferable Week Four is now up at Thrillbent.  Check it out, tell your friends.  By now, it should be becoming obvious that one of the creative decisions Peter Krause and I made about the series is a veritable gift to our letterer, Troy Peteri–because we didn’t want either Nocturnus or Galahad to be “the right one” or “the wrong one” regarding their feud, we elected to forego thought balloons and captions so you can’t get inside their heads.  Bonus for Troy: LOTS OF SILENT PANELS.

Which is kind of a shame, ’cause Troy is PHENOMENALLY talented (and a great guy to boot, universally loved among the Thrillbent crew, and even I can’t make THAT claim), and his work is always a joy to behold. Beginning letterers, pay attention to how Troy’s balloon placements help lead the eye around the page where it’s supposed to go. Look closely at the fonts he chooses and notice how easy they are to read while, at the same time, communicating a subtle tone for the overall series.  He works in Adobe Illustrator to produce a set of .eps files, colorist Nolan Woodard works in Adobe Photoshop to turn Pete’s black-and-white scans into colored .tiffs, and every week I marry the two sets of files into what you read on the screen, in a process that takes maybe five minutes because I’m working with seasoned pros. If you’ve got any questions about lettering for Troy, post them here and I’ll see if I can cajole some answers from him. I bet I can.