What I read last…
December 2011.
Du Plomb Dans La Tête, by Colin Wilson and Matz.
This time I'm writing about the black & white collection in the original French language, instead of the colour, English translation.
I love the art so much more in this printing,a despite the smaller, paperback size, but then again I almost always enjoy a b&w version of a story more than a colour version.
Also the lettering is so beautiful this time around. It's by Wilson I believe, instead of a dedicated lettering "specialist". Wilson has hand drawn the gorgeous letterforms, done with brush from the looks of it, as well as hand inscribed the word balloons, all of which makes such a wonderful change from the boring and bland computer lettering and geometrically precise balloons we get in most comics now.
Rocksalt, by Mark Withington
This is a really fun lo-fi sci-fi adventure with great characters and nice style all 'round. Full review coming soon.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, by Hergé.
There's been a sad and embarrassing gap in my comic-reading history. But no more! Finally, after reading comics for 36 years, I've experienced a Tintin comic! There's a full review coming soon to let you know exactly what I thought.
I haven't read that bd, but I agree with you re speech bubbles. I think one can get away with computer letters if the speech bubble itself is hand drawn, but if both the letters and the bubbles are computer made rather than hand drawn, it's lacking something.
ReplyDeleteThe question is whether the generation below us, who grew up with fewer hand-drawn and more computer-assisted speech bubbles, feel the same way we do. I think they do, but I've never really looked into it.
That's an interesting thought regarding the generation one younger than us JMS. I think it's probably really obvious to them when they do see a hand-lettered book vs. a computer lettered one. Whether or not that matters much to them though is another matter.
ReplyDeleteOf course really, the great percentage of mainstream/super-hero books were lettered in a very basic manner for most of the time anyway, with very few letterers being noteworthy even with their application of sound effects, let alone speech and thought balloons. John Workman and Tom Orzechowski coming immediately to mind as ones that were indeed worth noting. It's really been mostly in independent comics that the art of lettering has been treated with some importance. Here Dave Sim is the one that is uppermost in my experience, though of course there's many others.