Let ‘er RING!

One of the main things we handle here in Pre-Press is lettering corrections.  Even though we have a lettering department right here across the hall from us, production artists handle a vast majority of the corrections.  If we continue to follow a comic’s production process, after a book is drawn, it is sent out to be colored and lettered.  As the book is being colored, either our lettering department, or a couple of freelance letterers put all the words and balloons, and sound effects on the pages in Adobe Illustrator.  When the entire book is completely lettered, whether we have any color in or not, the book is routed.  The letterers work right off the script in a Word Document, and letter a comic according to the placement that the editors draw in on “Dummy Book”, or photocopied version of the artwork.  When the lettering is complete, the editor goes through the book, and makes all the changes that they need made by the letterer.  Mostly all the major lettering corrections are done by the original letterer at this stage, and once again routed to the editor.  Once it is approved, the editor then turns the book into the Pre-Press department.  This is when we get our grubby little hands on it for the first time.  When the art is in, and now the lettering is complete, we can begin to “Quark-Up” the book.  We use the Quark program to combine the art files with the lettering files, and print out proofs for the editors, to rout once again.  At this stage, mostly all the corrections are done to the art, color (which comes in as it is done), and now any lettering corrections that need to be made are also done by us.

Once the editor gives the sign off that the lettering has been approved, and the book goes into Pre-Press, any lettering corrections that are found after that, are usually handled by the production artist of that book.  In an ideal world, all the corrections and changes to the lettering should have been done in the second round of corrections sent back to the original letterer of said book.  But that is usually never the case.  The editor is always making changes to the script,, along with the writer emailing corrections up until the last minute when the book has to go out to the printers.  That is the kind of things that we handle on the tail end of a comic’s process.  The lettering corrections that we make are just as important as the art corrections we make, and sometimes, there are a TON of changes to make once a book is Quarked-up.  Not only do we do last minute spelling corrections, we handle alignment issues (balloons that are not falling perfectly on the borders of a panel that they need to be falling on), balloon movements (moving balloons around on a page that are either out of order, or obstructing artwork that wasn’t noticed before), fixing tails (speech tails going to the wrong people that weren’t caught before), and sound effect color selections.  That last one is a HUGE part of a Pre-Press Artist’s job.  The letter creates and places all sound effects made in a book, but since they work mostly off of black and white artwork because the color files have not been received yet, all the sound effects are white as a default color.  When we quark-up the book, the editor marks up all the sound effects as to what color he or she wants them to be.

Sound effects colors and changes are made and changed up until the book is due to the printers.  A lot of the time, it is the final thing we do before we make a flattened PDF file of the book to send out, because the editor is always changing their mind on what colors to use for each sound effect.  When I say sound effect, I also mean all the caption color boxes, and sometimes even balloon colors.  Any and all coloring that goes into any lettering is done almost all by the production artist, working with the lettering department.  The lettering department sometimes does guess as to what color should be in a certain sound effect or caption.  But usually, the editor winds up having us change that.  It really all depends on one thing, and that is when the color files finally appear.  When a book is finally colored, the editor begins to see what colors they want to match up with the colored artwork, in the lettering.  Some editors usually wait until the color is in before they have us put ANY color into the lettering.

Each comic book is very particular about their color choices for lettering as well as the editor of said books.  For some books, there is a clear cut palette that is used over and over again.  For some books, like 100 Bullets, each different character in the cmic had a set caption color, so the reader knew who was speaking.  Same thing with books like the JLA, or JSA where there are hundreds of different characters.  In cases such as those, we have Illustrator templates, that the letterers and we use to grab the color we need for specific characters or comics.  In the case of JLA, or JSA, there is a document that has caption boxes for every known character we could think up, and what color they should be.  This is a BIG help when the editor just tells us to make a caption box the color of say, the Star Spangled Kid.  We just go to the template, and grab the colors off of the one we need.

All our Illustrator files work off of a basic 4-color process, that is CMYK.  That means that all colors are made using Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black.  Combining values of 1-100 of each of these colors, creates thousands upon thousands of different color choices.  For example, a color of C-0, M-100, Y-100, K-0 is the equivalent to your basic red color as everyone knows red to be.  But when you start adding more C value, say c-30 to that red, you start to get a much deeper red.  Same effect would happen if you start adding black to that color now, or “k”.  The color would then get much, much darker.  Any and all different combination’s can be used to get any shade or value of all the colors of the rainbow for whatever the editor prefers.  The editors almost all have a CMYK value chart, where they can pick a color they like, and then below the color is the value that needs to be used in CMYK format, that they can then tell us, the production artist, exactly the values they want used for a caption or sound effect.

That being said, not only is there all those different choices for an editor to choose the colors for a comic, they also have the option to create a gradient for their captions and sound effects.  A gradient is a taking one CMYK color, and fading it into another, with as many colors in between as you want, to create different colors stretching out as far as you make the gradient.  For example, you can take a C-0 M-100 Y-100 K-0 red and make a gradient to C-30 M-0 Y100 K-0.  That would give you a fade of a red color to a yellow.  We use this one a lot for sound effects such as explosions.  It gives a nice color fade from red to yellow, making it have an orange fade in the middle because the gradient is creating a blend of the red and yellow.  You can also direction this gradient any way you’d like.  Up, or down, yellow to red fade, or have each individual letter of the sound effect be it’s own red to yellow fade.  Illustrator is one of the most AMAZING programs ever created, and can do basically ANYTHING you could possible think of.  To be able to master that program, is one of the BEST things someone interested in comic book production can do.  Learn that program (along with Photoshop), and you too can “make” comic books.  Just don’t steal my job, LoL.

Last thing I will talk about with the lettering, and that is finalizing it.  We have a very strick set of rules for set up our lettering files before it is finally sent off to be printed.  We call this process “Pre-Flighting”.  Pre-Flighting is the process by which we back up our lettering files to be read by our printers.  Much like a colorist has to back up his colors (which I’ll have to talk about in a future column; nice, an idea for a future column), lettering must be back up as well.  What I mean by backing up lettering is bascially making sure that all the blacks are a 4-color black, and all the strokes and sound effects are set to be ‘OVERPRINT”.  Overprint is something in Illustrator that makes sure all your blacks are printing over artwork that is also CMYK color files.  Since are artwork is done in CMYK, we need to make sure the blacks have an overlap over the art, and show up as the color they are made in the lettering files.  For example, if we have a sound effect that is y-100, with a stroke of k-100 (an outline around the yellow), we need to overprint that black.  That makes a STRONG black color that will not be transparent over the colored artwork when placed over it in quark, and then in the final PDF file that is sent to the printers.  This is a very, very complex process, and one that needs to be taught exactly how to do, since it is very very specific to the entire printing process.  You need to know a lot about how the CMYK process works and what needs to be set in Illustrator to have the effects that you want done to show up on the printed version of what you are working on.  Whether or not, for example, a black sound effect border needs to be C-60 M-40 Y-40 K-100 with an overprint stroke is very, very important.  If you see a comic book out there, where you say, “hey, why can I see artowrk through this balloon?”  It was probably because it was not Pre-flighted correctly.  If you remember the case with All-Star Batman & Robin #10, where the curse words came through black boxes in front of them, that was an example of not having done the Pre-Flighting correctly.

Below I will show you examples of a lot of what I was talking about above, and hopfully some visual aids with help in understand what we as Pre-Press artist’s do in regards to making any and all lettering corrections.  Totally different ballpark then art corrections.  Much more technical, and definitely more digital then the art corrections, where more manual skill is needed.  But just as fun, none-the-less!

CMYK Sample Color Chart

Example of Credit Name Lettering Fix – Cover Credit must be changed to Davide Furno

Example of Credit Name Lettering Fix – Cover Credit changed to Davide Furno using direct Selection tool, and copying & pasting via “Ransom Note” Method

Example of Sound Effects that need to be colored

Example of corrected, colored Sound Effects.  1st SFX- Gradient 2nd SFX- c-25 3rd SFX- Individual Letters Grad

Example of Template for Color Captions for Specific Characters – Lettering by Rob Leigh

Example of Quarked Color Art without Lettering

Example of Quarked Color Art with Lettering

Example of Pre-Flighting, backing up blacks

Backing up blacks, with overprint stroke

Until Next Time,

Corey Breen