What I Do For a Living
When I go out in public and people ask me, I say "Graphic artist". It's simpler and avoids having to go through the drill. It's almost like a drinking game...
"What do you do?"
"I'm a comic book letterer."
"A what?"
"I put the words in the balloons and I do the sound effects"
"So you write?"
Extra shots if we get into manga...
"So do you know Japanese?"
:headdesk:
Well, even more obscure than that is that I'm a retouch artist. My strength isn't in letterforms and font building nor titling and logos. My background is in illustration, so I think I'm better at it than the average Joe off the street, but I just can't geek typography. Because of it, I sometimes feel kinda weird about calling myself a "letterer".
But I think I'm really good at what I DO do.
I turn panels like this into something English readers can appreciate...
The above panel comes to me on a disc from Kodansha (via Dark Horse). I then have a white layer added to it to cover the Japanese sound effects...
You'll note that the white out job is kinda down-n-dirty. The stuff under Urd's thigh was forgotten and some of the white out kinda missed. I go over and clean that stuff up as I go along.
What really sucks time is this part...
(click on the image for closer look)
The above is the panel with the white patch at half opacity so you can see the original Japanese underneath. I drew every one of those stupid speedlines by hand in Photoshop. If I got lucky, I cut and pasted a few.
(click on the image for closer look)
(BTW, the sfx is copyright ME. If you kids steal it and put it in your manga-style book like you did with my brush-drawn sfx, you're goin' to hell. And I'll be there to laugh at how weak your scans are. I'm just sayin'. (^_~))
And then I hand-drew a big sfx on top of it. I had to erase the excess so it would sit behind Urd.
This is what Dark Horse gets:
(click on the image for closer look)
This particular panel took me a couple of days of pecking at it. I tend to get bored and go on to other pages to break up the ennui.
Sadly, this skill is not much in demand anymore. The trend is to subtitle sound effects. I have mixed feelings on that. It makes turning out the books much faster, but it also clutters up the page and sullies the composition.
I'll probably be posting these before and after things just to share what goes into producing "Oh My Goddess!" I know there are maybe two people who read this thing that want to know why this book is chronically late. I really don't have a satisfactory answer for that. But I CAN say that the earlier volumes take a bit more time than one would think.
Ugh. I just finished a volume. Now I have to start the next one...
ETA:I added an extra image to add a step. I hope it makes things clearer!