Lettering Mantle

When we last left our heroes, we were staring at a lovely coloured page from Mantle #1... without any words on it. Those words – or "lettering", as we call it in comics – are the final craft in the process of making each page of Mantle, and I add them myself.

From a technical perspective, I lettered in Clip Studio Paint and used a Comicraft font called "Victory Speech". I chose a mixed-case font – meaning it includes both upper- and lower-case letters – which is weirdly controversial in the world of comics. Traditionally, comic book lettering is all capitalized and mixed-case is uncommon. (One of my all-time favourite cartoonists says he won't even read comics with mixed-case lettering!) I personally like the feel of reading properly-capitalized sentences in comics, and I think people who don't typically read comics would especially appreciate them... so that's what I'm doing.

More importantly, the reason I letter Mantle is because it allows me a final pass at making the words fit the pictures (most of the dialogue in my script changes a little in response to Gian's art) and controlling how the reader's eye moves across the page. I like to own that aspect of how the story is experienced.

So, without further ado, here is our famous page from Mantle #1 with lettering:

Next time, in what is likely to be our final update before the campaign ends, I'll talk about how I got back to making comics and how Mantle – this particular story and its characters – came to exist in the first place.