In the Year 2000 – Part III

Continuing on with how we used to work on comics back in the early 2000’s in the DC Comics Bullpen, I have to reiterate how much fun it was work in this fashion.  When we got a book out of the draw, we never knew what kind of corrections awaited us.  It was really a crap shoot as far as how much work would be needed on any particular book, and how long it would take us to complete it.  We generally had to average ONE book a day.  Mostly all books were still the standard 22 pages long, but if you got the luck of the draw and pulled out a 64 pager, well then… that was going take a hell-of-a-lot longer to do then just one day.

Going back to where I left on in Part II of this topic, I said I would talk a little bit about overlays, velum lettering, and books that were lettered by Comic Craft.  Each one required a different process.  Starting with overlays, any book that was not lettered directly on the boards was lettered on either overlays, or velum sheets.  An overlay would be either a separate comic board, or some other sheet of 11 x 17 inch paper, that the letterer, well, lettered on.  Mostly done by a light-box, he just lettered onto another board, which matched up to the art below it.  This was usually done because of artists’ preference, but mostly because of time constraints.  When this happened, we had to log in this lettering to our Stat Room guy.

The Stat room was basically DC Comics’ Dark Room.  If you were in the Bullpen back in the day, our set up was a little bit different.  Where the lettering department is now, there used to be a secret hidden room, where the Dark Room was.  When we gave the “stat guy” lettering, his job was go in the dark room and with this HUGE machine, take a photo stat of the lettering.  This produced a “photocopy” of the page that reproduced it on a film like glossy sheet.  With this new page, we were then able to use the lettering as paste-up.  We had a wax machine that ran all day long, that, when you ran this proof through it, hot wax was applied to the back of the page.  The wax was used as adhesive for when we cut out the balloons, we were able to “paste” it on to the original art board.  We cut out the balloons and captions using an exacto-knife and placed it on the board where the letterer had indicated.  Since the letter did his work as an overlay, the lettering matched up with the art where he needed it.  Our job was therefore just to make the stat of the page, wax it, and then paste it on the board.  Kind of a crazy process that was!

Comic Craft lettering was a bit different.  Since they were one of the only ones working digitally at the time, they did all there lettering in Illustrator.  Since we didn’t work digital yet, we would get proofs of all the pages printed out from Illustrator from them.  Most of the time, they were kind of crappy loose-leaf printouts of the page with the balloons, captions and text.  We treated this though, as if it was a stat that we had made.  So we just waxed up the page, and again, pasted it onto the board.

Once the lettering was one the art, then we could finally do all the corrections the editor and proofreader needed, much in the same way I talked about in Part I.  With Comic Craft lettering, we really had to do a number on it because they had their really specific fonts they used, since it was digital lettering.  We could not “fake” it, or just write any letters we needed, which we could sometimes do with hand-drawn lettering that everyone else used.  So really had to painstakingly “ransom note” the corrections, as well as create all new balloons that specifically matched their digital work.  Working on a Comic Craft book was quite the ordeal, even though they were at the time, my favorite letterer because of that digital look.  In my next column I will talk about how they influenced us to FINALLY go digital with ALL of our lettering and take the next step in comic book production, and art that Marvel Comics were already doing.  We were about to take the next step into the digital age, and the wonder that is technology.  It was wild times, as you will hear, because it was such a HUGE transition for us.

Until next time…

Corey Breen

PS- I know I didn’t get to talk about doing art corrections in this week’s column, but I didn’t forget about it.  I will go back and talk about that soon, since I didn’t realize that would require it’s very own column!  Sorry about that, but it will be worth the wait, because that part was/ is the best part of our job, where we, as Production Artist actually get to contribute art to these wonderful periodicals!