5. The Making of a Comic: Lettering Tips & 'Martial Law' with Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Lettering process, tips, and more from the editor of the Eisner-award winning magazine PanelxPanel
Howdy Brave Being,
Welcome back to The Making of a Comic! Joining us this week is Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, letterer extraordinaire, YouTube channel host of Strip Panel Naked, and editor of the Eisner-award winning magazine PanelxPanel. We’ll be diving into his lettering process and experience as a magazine editor.
We’ll also exploring MARTIAL LAW, a short comic that I wrote with art by Christian DiBari, colors by Simon Gough, and letters by, you guessed it, Hassan! This project was a bit unique since it started as a poem versus a traditional comic book script. So we’ll see how different or not so different it was from Hassan’s other projects.
Let’s hop to it!
Brittany Matter: Tell us a little bit about how you became a letterer.
Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou: This was the fault of Deniz Camp (who wrote the excellent Maxwell's Demons with Vittorio Astone). I was working on a pitch for a comic and he suggested I might enjoy lettering it myself, and he was right! I started playing around with it and I think it just sort of clicked. It just made sense, ticked the right boxes for how my brain works, I think!
BM: What's your go-to first step when lettering a new book?
HO-E: I guess what I'm looking for is the line of the pen the artist uses. So is it smooth, thick, thin, crunchy, etc. Just trying to see what "style" the art is, and then working to create a style that fits that. Beyond that it's also genre concerns, tone of the story, if there's any different unique voices I might need to make and how to balance that, that sort of thing. But it always starts with the line of the artist really!
BM: What are some tricks that you often employ in your lettering process?
HO-E: I don't know if it's a trick but I like making my own custom brushes. I think like you want your lettering to look at one with the art, but it's such a digital process that you have to find a way to kind of un-digital what you're doing in as many ways as possible. So I like to have a range of brush styles for the balloons that makes them feel a bit more organic. I was just making some for a new project yesterday, basically drawing lines with "natural" looking brushes and seeing what works well in Illustrator to make it look like, not just too "clean," if that makes sense.
BM: What kind of tips would you give to aspiring letterers?
HO-E: I like to almost reverse engineer lettering that I like. So figuring out what it is I like about other letterer's work and then just playing around with Illustrator until I can recreate it. Doing that usually leads you to learn something else, and find a different version of that which makes more sense to you, too. Also reach out to other people whose work you like and ask for advice! I remember speaking to Aditya Bidikar a lot about lettering, showing him some things I was doing, I guess talking shop and just chatting about styles and approaches, which was really useful to learn from. I think most people are happy to chat about what they do.
BM: Tell us a little bit about how you tackle sound effects.
HO-E: It depends on the book and the art style, but for the most part I hand-draw my SFX, either in Photoshop and port them over to Illustrator, or directly in Illustrator itself. It's like a real time-killer haha, but I find that gives me the most freedom (and is more fun) than doing them as fonts. It's also another way to give your work a little unique character. I don't think anyone's SFX look the same as mine, in as much the same way that artists who draw their own SFX look like anyone else's work. But with SFX fonts there's kind of a handful you see quite a lot, so I try to avoid using them unless the art has that really crisp, clean, digital line quality, where fonts tend to work quite well.
BM: What's something about lettering that you think people don't know?
HO-E: I don't think most people know that much about lettering generally! But also there's not much you need to know to read comics anyway. Errr, this is a good question ... I suppose some of the specifics, like it's *usually* not a letterer who chooses what words to bold (though I usually make a few decisions while lettering), and most of the job as I see it (beyond the design part) is really about flow and legibility. There's a lot you can do in lettering to completely change the way people read a comic. Like you could take a standard nine panel grid page, and through balloon placement, you could force the reader to read the page in a non-traditional way. There's a lot of power in it, and most of the time our role is to create some clarity and a path through the art.
PanelxPanel
BM: As the Editor of PanelxPanel, what's been your favorite part about working on it?
HO-E: Just getting to read the pieces we have in every issue, and working with a whole bunch of fantastic writers over the years. I suppose compared to a website that's updating daily we don't run as many pieces, but yeah, just having space for this big range of writers to get stuck into writing about comics is really fun to read every month.
BM: What has been the most challenging aspect of editing a magazine?
HO-E: Just doing it every month. It's so much work, honestly. I edit about 10 pieces a month, have to lay out about 100 pages of the magazine, sort the cover out, manage the Gumroad page, try and promote it as much as I can, do about two interviews a month, arrange the essays and pieces for the next month or two... it's quite a lot of work to manage around everything else. So that's a challenge constantly, but it is incredibly satisfying at the end of the month when you see the 100 page finished magazine and you're like, "Wow, okay, we managed it." And then you have a couple of days break and start all over again, haha!
BM: What's your best advice to those interested in editing and self-publishing?
HO-E: I can probably give better advice for self publishing rather than editing, but just make the thing you want to make. I had no idea if PanelxPanel was going to have a readership, but I just wanted to make the thing I wanted to read. I think if you are passionate about the thing you do, and you go at it with some of that love and passion for it, eventually other people will notice that. Self publishing also means you can do whatever you want! So that story you want to tell or that magazine you want to make, you don't need to worry about if someone else will sign it off or if one specific person sees value in it -- if you think it's good, guaranteed someone else probably will out there, too. And the internet means it’s a lot easier to find those people.
Martial Law
BM: Tell us how you approached this project since it didn't have a traditional comic book script.
HO-E: This is kind of related to that answer earlier about flow. Even with a standard script with traditional dialogue, you're looking at where things would be best placed on the page. And your role as letterer is to bring some that expertise of comic making and knowing what does and doesn't work, so this was no different than that, just looking and understanding where best everything would go and how best to present it! It's "harder" in the sense that things aren't as called out, but really I just think that's part of the job anyway.
BM: How did you decide on the color scheme for the lettering?
HO-E: Digging my mind back, I think this was just a response to the art. For something like this I look at the colours of the art, see what is recurring in the palette, and just try and match that against it. It's a little easier in this case because the lettering was larger than standard dialogue lettering, so it makes four-color colors a little easier to use.
BM: What did you learn from this project that has contributed to your growth as a letterer?
HO-E: So this was one of the first things I did where I worked in Photoshop. I think, because there were no traditional lettering elements here, that I did the whole short in Photoshop, but it was this that really got me thinking about how to incorporate hand drawn raster elements in Photoshop into my work, which completely changed the way I thought about making sound effects, and realising that I wasn't just locked into using Illustrator, and I could draw elements in Photoshop and move them across. Sometimes these seem like really obvious points, but it takes a certain project to give you an opportunity to experiment and try things out, so I'm very grateful about that!
Getting to know Hassan
BM: What have been some of your favorite genres to letter and why?
HO-E: Horror is always good fun, because there's usually some grotesque sound effects and weird voices, that sort of thing. I love doing the shorts in Razorblades because it's just like a whole bunch of short horror stories, so there's always something different to play with. And superhero or comedy (or superhero comedy) books are fun, too. Big, bombastic stuff, loud sound effects, people shouting at each other, haha. Anything where I can do something outlandish or stupid is great fun. I laughed a lot when I was lettering Quantum and Woody, where I just sort of threw everything at the page and got away with it. I remember another letterer messaging me after that came out, saying "You really did a lot in that book", haha. That was great.
BM: How do you juggle the magazine, your YouTube channel, lettering, and life?
HO-E: I think, in a really unhelpful way from an advice stand point, I'm quite fast at working. I've basically been freelancing for my whole working life, and I think that's one of the things you learn to do quickly. So I work fast, I schedule very heavily, and make sure I take time off on the weekends and evenings and not try to do ridiculous hours as a regular thing. Things take a hit, though. The YouTube channel only has a new episode about every six weeks now, because time to research and write and edit the episodes isn't as easy to come by. But yeah, work fast, schedule well, and you can pretty much do anything then! Haha.
BM: How do you get out of a creative rut?
HO-E: From that last question, sometimes you just don't have time to be in a rut, but when it happens, I look at work that I love and use that to get me going. Sometimes you struggle with a lettering style or something, so I just dig out some old work that the art reminds me of and see how it was approached by a handletterer or the artist themselves. Or I look at how that person has been lettered before and see what elements of that I like and don't like and use that as a starting point to build from. But yeah, I know maybe it sounds boring, but as a letterer sometimes you just don't have the time to be stuck in a rut, so you just gotta work through it!!
BM: What are you working on lately?
HO-E: I've been lettering a new arc of X-O Manowar, just wrapping up a couple of Kickstarter OGNs, and a whole slew of unannounced things. Plus working on the 50th issue of PanelxPanel, which is out at the end of August! A really big issue where we're just getting into some of our favourite comics from the past 50 years. Should be a fun one!
BM: Wow! What an incredible milestone! Looking forward to it. Check out all the PanelxPanel issues leading up to the oversized 50th issue and follow the magazine here. Don’t forget to follow Hassan to see his latest creations.
Stay tuned for more interviews and updates coming down the internet pipeline! That’s a thing, right? I hear it’s under the ocean. :)