ASYSTOLE, or the Art of Designing Type for Comic Books

I began lettering comic books professionally in 1977, for Gold Key Comics, then DC, then Marvel, and in the years since pretty much every publisher except Archie. Had I known back then that I'd still be doing this sort of work in my sixties, I wouldn't have been happy to hear it. Whether it was the optimal outlet for my energies, it's helped pay the bills and at its best, it's an awful lot of fun.

Thirty years ago it became clear that eventually computers were going to replace human beings with ink pens. The early digital lettering wasn't much to look at, but its advantages loomed over every letterer's head. It takes ten years to learn to letter well by hand, but anyone with a computer and some decent software can do it at least passably. Marvel was the first major company to really embrace the technology. DC, a company which has always been more finicky about the way stuff looked, held back, As late as 2001, the Vice President at the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics told my wife that there was little danger of my work, and that of my hand lettering colleagues, ever being replaced by digital lettering. Hand lettering just plain looked better, flowed in harmony better with hand-drawn pictures, and had an elegance lacking in even the best computer work. There simply was no comparison.

It was two years later than this same Vice President had to spend the day phoning every freelance letterer in her rolodex with the bad news: In six months, all such work was going to be done digitally, by an in-house staff. I didn't envy her having to make these phone calls, one after another, to a pool of freelancers whom she had treated as friends for years. But that's why she had the corner office, to do the dirty jobs when necessary.

Like most of my colleagues, I'd piddled around with digital lettering, and done a few projects on the computer. I did a graphic novel for Vertigo called Orbiter digitally, and a miniseries for DC called "Death and the Maidens". It was okay. A little sterile, and not a whole lot of fun to do, but workable.

What bothered me about digital was the sameness of the alphabet or, maybe, two alphabets available for lettering. Hand lettering always meant a panoply of different letterforms. If your digital font is all upper case, then you can have two slightly different versions of each letter of the alphabet available, if you care about not repeating characters. If your upper case E is slightly different than your lower case e, and if you have to type the word "glee", then you can type "gleE" or "GLEe" and avoid the obvious repetition.

The two guys who really blazed the trail in making digital lettering viable were Richard Starkings and John Roshell at Comicraft. But part of their business philosophy was that they would make no attempt to make their lettering appear to be handmade. The stuff was digital, and digital was just fine. Comicraft may have put a lot of other guys out of business, but it's hard to fault the quality of its best work. I don't know Richard well, but John Roshell is a friend, and has designed some beautiful type families. After perfecting their process over some years and thousands of pages, Comicraft began selling its type, and the digital lettering market was suddenly open to anyone with some visual savvy, a computer, and a copy of Adobe Illustrator. Nate Piekos, another excellent designer, followed in Comicraft's footsteps, selling comic book type to those who wished to do lettering.

Through some very wise counsel from my wife Lisa, I was able to remain in DC Comics' freelance pool, even after almost every other letterer was let go. How that happened is a story in itself. But once having been accepted as one of the people who would provide DC's books with digital lettering, I had to learn to produce the stuff, and do so in a fashion that would satisfy my own sense of what digital comic book lettering ought to look like.

It took me six years to figure out how to do what I felt must be done; in the years prior to that, I produced a few thousand pages which, to my way of thinking, were rather lifeless. The quest was to find a means of producing lettering with the sense of playfulness which occurs automatically in hand lettering and, for that matter, in any kind of human handwriting.

The essence of the problem which has to be solved can be illustrated by one word: ASYSTOLE. Chew on that for a bit, and stop in for Part Two. I'll explain all.

The Spillway Girl Part Two

July's Spillway Girl opus was a design which underwent very little change once its main lines were transferred to the full sized canvas. Having painted the scene once as a small sketch, and having tried various other compositional schemes, I had settled on what it was I thought the picture wanted to be. Its various stages of completion were just refinements. Maybe there's a lesson in that. Abraham Lincoln said that if he were given six hours to cut down a tree, he'd spend four of them sharpening his axe. My sharpening time, chronicled in previous essays here, enabled me to work efficiently and well. And an added bonus, a model who wanted badly for the picture to succeed, was a benefit that's impossible to overstate. When I wanted to stay home and make comic books, she had a habit of calling and asking when I planned on showing up at the Spillway.

The various stages of the picture need little explanation. Here they are:

Living with the picture day after day, I began to crave certain rhythms absent in the initial pose. The above sketch was an idea which I thought would improve the picture. Having a living model, I had the option of making such changes without sacrificing the verisimilitude which one often loses when working from the imagination. The crook in her wrist, and the action of her sandal which amplified it, appeared to be an improvement.

It's not exactly a linear progression, in which nebulous forms come out of a fog into sharp focus. Rather, the sharp focus is a matter of my own realization of what I sought. Hard edges are softened, hardened, softened again. Generalized form and color are made very specific, regeneralized, and respecified. What nudges the picture forward? What can be done without? One can't keep going forever, although Degas' clients were rightfully wary of ever allowing him to borrow back pictures they'd purchased from him: likely they would never satisfy him, and they'd never be returned.

That said, after all of these sessions, I considered the picture a success, and I still do.

The Landscape Still Life

Still life is usually painted in the studio, under controlled light. Delacroix did some open air still life, and probably other people, but mostly it's an indoor sport.

Not one of Delacroix's more famous pieces, or even one of his best, but has always had a kind of wild charm. A series of objects more suited to Chardin than the Romantics, but instead of chiaroscuro, painted in plein aire light.

But once upon a time I was out in my truck hunting for landscape motifs, and blundered into a series of manmade objects which caught my eye, a bunch of nondescript objects lying by a barn in Batavia, Ohio. Most of them I couldn't even name. Nor did I, as I have been taught, rethink their arrangement in abstract terms, and then move them around to suit my fancy. This was a Found Arrangement, and it didn't want any alterations from me.

Exactly what I found so charming is hard to put into words, although the preponderance of the three primary colors certainly was a factor. The blue tube — I have no idea what it actually was — had a brilliant highlight I admired. The block of wood's side plane was lit up by reflected light from the ground, although this can't be seen from the photograph. I don't know. I just dug it.

It was certainly worth a 16x20" canvas, and I just happened to have one such canvas in my truck. I went at it, although the three primary color notion was lost when I began scribbling in a green for the dying grass.

I loved placing the setup off to the side. I loved the rhythm of the objects, which I did my best not to screw around with. It just seemed peaceful, and pleasing, and in its own humble fashion, profound.

I generally do better work if I've taken the time to scribble the whole scene in pencil, which I did do here. Hardly a drawing to win a beauty contest, but it captured the melody of the scene, and gave me an idea of what I was trying to accomplish. This sketch was done before the above lay-in.

On the second and final day I restated everything, bringing the drawing into a little better focus. And I added the reflected light to the side planes of the wood block, and some in the interior surface of the blue cylinder.

The red object is a spool around which heavy cable gets wound.

Good luck trying to sell something like this, although it does what a good small picture should do: it's a simple, peaceful arrangement of shapes, a little 16x20" oasis of logic and clarity which really ought to be hanging in the home of someone who thrives on clearheaded thinking, and love. Which is exactly what happened. Currently it hangs on the wall in the home of my son Dylan Bell.

23.5°

The Earth's axial tilt of 23.5°, as we all learned in elementary school, produces our four seasons. An engineer friend once did the basic solid geometry work for me that proved that at our winter solstice in Cincinnati, we received slightly less than half the sunlight on a given area of land than we do at the summer solstice. It's not tough to understand. When the sun shines down on us at a more oblique angle, the same quantity of sunshine is spread out over a larger area.

I never was terribly aware of the lowering of the noonday sun until I began doing a lot of outdoor landscape painting. When one is fascinated with reproducing the sensation of bright sunshine on canvas, the lack of such sunshine becomes something personal. I recall one November afternoon a few years back, trying to fake it, to pretend that the days were as bright as they are in the summer. One might just as well pretend that there is no law of gravity. Seasons ought to be embraced. One can choose to live at a lower or higher latitude, but that 23.5° just won't go away. If you want the dazzle of sunshine in your winter pictures, you may have to stick to the Golden Hour (see the post from two weeks ago), and catch the descending sun's rays as they hit upright objects perpendicularly, as they do the ground plane during the summer.

When Europeans first began exploring equatorial Africa and South America, a lot of them did so at the cost of their eyesight. I've never experienced sunlight from directly overhead, and neither had they, but it isn't something to be trifled with. I have a friend in Brazil. I keep toying with the idea of asking him to host me for a few weeks in late December sometime. I'd love to see for myself sometime the ultimate blast of the sun, and see it right on the heels of winter solstice here.

Another fantasy long held is the notion of getting in my truck in the middle of June and driving as far north as roads will take me. Civilization seems to require a sun that climbs a few degrees,

The noonday sun goes up, and it goes down. At its nadir we celebrate, because we know it's going to begin to creep upward. Chanukah, Ramadan, Kwanza, the Roman Saturnalia, New Years Eve and of course Christmas. The best Biblical scholarship indicates Jesus Christ's birth taking place in early September, but the Roman Church leaders' choosing a date so close to the solstice can hardly be written off as a coincidence.

And of course it isn't just the height of the sun that changes, but the whole panoply of flora, fauna and atmosphere. Foliage and leaves disappear at the treetops, and then the level of that disappearance descends. November is the month of that descent. The trees reveal their structures, like a cocktail party of skeletons. Grass becomes brown.

I don't know the scientific reasons why, but winter skies do not resemble summer skies. The puffy cumulus clouds of summer aren't much in evidence. Stratus and cirrus clouds rule the day. You can see it in the picture above. Winter may not be as pleasant to the plein air painter as summer, but the skies are a lot easier to paint.

If you're smart, you'll hunt for the particular beauty to be found in each season and, for that matter, for each day of the year. If the height of the sun never changed, life would be far less pleasant.

It is noteworthy that, following the Great Flood, God told Noah that as long as the earth remained, there'd continue to be seasons (Genesis 8.22). This must have been a huge comfort to Noah. Little children thrive on daily schedules, familiar foods and predictable games. Grownups need the cycle of the seasons.

"The Circle Game", a celebration of the changing seasons and the process of growing up, is arguably Joni Mitchell's best song. "Here Comes the Sun" is about as good a piece of work as the Fab Four ever offered us. All of us, consciously or unconsciously, need to be reminded that life is a merry-go-round, not a conveyor belt.

Like it or lump it, summer looks like summer, fall looks like fall, winter looks like winter, and spring looks like spring. Impressionist landscape is the story of the changing seasons, and the only suggestion I can make is to dress in layers.