Kevin Nowlan link
by Frank Santoro
Thursday, April 22, 2010
CC reader and my new pal Michel Fiffe (who has a great blog) sent me an email about a comic near and dear to my heart. Outsiders Annual #1 is a great color comic that I’ve written about and pushed on True Believers for years.
The artist behind the book, Kevin Nowlan, has posted some versions of page one of the comic. It’s interesting to see how he composes the pages for the balloons and text. There’s so much text! American comics are so…dense.
So click away and check it out. Thanks, Michel.
Labels: Kevin Nowlan, Michel Fiffe
There’s a primo Kevin Nowlan interview in the “Panel Discussions” book that came out around 2004 or so, where he talks about how the first thing he plans out, or at least a very early thing, is the lettering. Definitely the first thing he’d ink. I think about that all the time, and when I started making my own comics a few years later I did the same thing. I think his point, which I’m sure I’ll misremember, was that the lettering *had* to get in there, so rather than have clunky bubble placements screw up his composition, he’d build around it–one of the reasons he insists on lettering his own stuff most of the time (again, this is conjecture on my part).
Nowlan is a great letterer in his own right, and Todd Klein is always amazing (been reading his work in the Promethea trades, awesome). Well done lettering doesn’t get enough respect in the comic creation process. Maybe because the best lettering – well-placed captions, word and thought balloons working in sync with the pictures – never calls attention to itself? Good lettering reads so intuitively and naturally that we aren’t aware of it when it succeeds. Makes sense Nowlan prefers to letter his own stuff as it informs his drafting/storytelling decisions.
…AND Nowlan letters by hand, which makes it even better. I think Klein went digital, no?
Speaking of digital, has anyone seen that “How to digitally ink” book from DC? That approach has nothing to do with the comics I like, but still… it’s pretty scary. What’s happening to comics?
Someone was telling me that Nowlan is the last person Marvel editorial allows to hand-letter his own stuff anymore, although I’m not sure when the last time he did any Marvel stuff was. I’m lettering Casanova now, and I asked the Marvel/Icon editors some questions about the best way to put my hand-lettering on existing art (because basically I have no idea how to do my own job), and they were stymied at first–questions of scanned-versus-printed resolution don’t come up much when dealing with vector letters.
Oops! That interview wasn’t in Panel Discussions at all. I bet it was an old issue of Draw! or something. I regret nothing.
Mr. Nowlan is putting up more pencils from this story: http://kevinnowlan.blogspot.com/2010/05/outsiders-annual-page-5.html
This one is my favorite when in color.