★★★★★ 5
It truly is the most Essential Guide
Format: Paperback
I've worked as a professional comic book letterer for more than a decade. I've had to learn a lot through trial and error since there was so little written about this technical field of work. Finally, there is now a book for amateur letterers to have all they need to understand the craft and for professional letterers to both reference and pick up new ideas from.
This book isn't just a tutorial on "how to letter comics." This also showcases creative ways to letter, interesting techniques that even experienced letterers might not know about, and - what I found to be the most helpful - the realities of a letterer's freelance life and ways the write had worked to develop a good workflow and healthy work schedule to avoid burnout or physical strain.
This is an engaging book, so even if you know how to letter well or you know nothing about lettering and want to understand the kind of work that letterers do, I highly recommend this as a great read. Through my experience, I developed very different methods than what this guide described, but both are valid and I even picked up new ideas and tried out new ways of doing things while reading this book.
If you want to learn how to letter, buy this book. If you want to be a better letterer, buy this book. If you don't want to letter but you want to know more about how comics are made or how one freelances in this industry, this guide is great for that too.
The only thing missing is a thorough explanation on how to develop one's own comic book fonts, but like the author said, that would take up an entire book in itself. Here's hoping one day there's a companion guide to comic book font creation, because I would love to learn more about that too.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2021
