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Since we’re producing Episode One as a project for college, we’ve tried beating the bushes at our college to find a letterer. After all, they have comic book production classes there, with specific lettering classes. So far, we’ve just hit dead ends. Maybe we’re not beating the bushes hard enough. WHACK! KAKAKA-THHOOOM!

We looked around on the web for some inexpensive lettering software that could export the final lettered artwork as a PDF (for digital distribution.) So far, nothing on that front. But we did find a software called Comic Life. For about 25 bucks, with Mac or Windows, it empowers you to take your own photos and easily make pages that look like comic books. You can try it out for free for a short time. It exports to some basic image formats like .jpg and .bmp – but not PDF. On the downside, it is impossible to place your text in the word balloons with any kind of precision. It’s more like a $25 toy than a serious production tool. But on the upside, it’s super fun to play with, and the text tool for sound effects is pretty radical – you can bend and stretch and re-color words like SHAKATABOOM! Look what we did in a couple minutes to some Franz Marc paintings:

For serious production, Richard Starking’s Comicraft recommends Adobe Illustrator. It’s a couple hundred bucks (for students anyway) and gives you everything you need to do custom lettering. Comicraft has a series of lettering tutorials you can check out for free – including some very practical tips on using Adobe Illustrator. And, if you sign up for their newsletter, they give you a free font to play with. If you’re willing to spend $70-$170 per font, you can buy fonts directly from Comicraft. We’re thinking about the Adam Kubert font for Sauratopia. (It was used on Ultimate X-Men, and only costs $70.) We downloaded the 30-day free trial of Adobe Illustrator that supposedly has all the functionality of the paid version. Plus, it looks like you can “rent” Illustrator if you don’t want to plunk down the cash to buy it right away.

So, just in case we have to letter the first issue ourselves, we’re armed with Comicraft’s wisdom and the right software. Oh yes, lest we forget, the creator of a comic called RagBox posted a very thorough lettering tutorial that walks you through the entire lettering process with some great tips along the way. We found it enormously helpful to see what we would be up against.