The most literal use of "literal" you'll see this year

[avram]

I followed a link to a Something Positive strip, and suddenly flashed on why I’ve never been able to follow this webcomic. It’s because I can’t read the thing. Literally.

Maybe this is just me. Something Positive has a large and devoted following, so obviously many people must be able to see words in those cramped, blurry masses of text. I can even do it, if I work at it. But it’s enough work to cancel out any enjoyment I might have gotten out of the strip.

For comparison, here are some word balloons from some webcomics I do follow. In each case, I grabbed the largest word balloon I could find from a recent strip.

Sordid City Blues by Charles Schneeflock Snow

Notice how readable this is, despite the small type size. That’s because Snow uses generous linespacing and a good font, and breaks his dialog up into small pieces. This was the biggest single word balloon I could find in a recent strip, and it’s only got 13 words. Snow makes his living as a graphic designer, so he knows how this stuff works.

Scary-Go-Round by John Allison

Large, clear type. Dialog broken up into small pieces. Again, 13 words.

Questionable Content by J Jacques

At 36 words, this clocks in as the largest balloon so far, and the type is pretty small, but mixed case makes it readable, as well as allowing Jacques to use all-caps for emphasis. The whitespace above lower-case letters means you can get away with less linespacing. It would be even better if he used a taller, narrower word balloon. And it suffers a bit for being placed against an open white background; I probably should have included the balloon borders in these images.

Templar, Arizona by Spike

I’m not actually sure that Spike uses computer lettering. Possibly she uses a font based on her handwriting for most of the dialog, and then hand-letters special stuff, like the “God” in this balloon. In any case, the large lettering, extensive use of italics and boldface and underlining and occasional other effects, and the breaking up of long speeches into smaller balloons (this one is 20 words, but it’s one of five balloons in that one panel, in which only that character is speaking), not only makes the text very readable, it conveys the rhythm of actual speech. (Update: Spike commented below; all the text’s hand-lettered.)

Now, here’s Something Positive by RK Milholland

That’s 60 damn words crammed into one big balloon, all caps, with practically no space between the lines, and a font that has almost no space between the letter I and adjacent letters. (Look how the I almost blurs into the N in “insane” and “screamin’”.) This is a strip where much of the humor is conveyed through dialog, but the dialog is presented with almost no care. Look over that word balloon again, then look at the middle panel in that Templar, Arizona strip, and imagine how Spike would have presented it.

It may not be fair to compare these strips, since all of the first four are larger than Something Positive. Sordid City Blues is 900 pixels wide, and Questionable Content is a massive 1418 pixels tall! But Milholland is the one who chooses how to lay out his strip, and how much dialog to put in it. He can make it bigger, or write less, if he wants to. An advantage of webcomics as a medium is that they come with very few artistic constraints.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

I had never thought about that, but I thnk that may be why I've never gotten into Something Positive. I know a lot of people who swear by it, but reading it always seems like work to me.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I like S*P, but it is fucking chatty.

[avram]

Yeah, that was my first reaction to it. Too word-heavy.

Except Templar, Arizona, my favorite webcomic, is also pretty damn chatty. Spike spreads the chat out more, presents it better. Makes it seem like real dialog, instead of a block of printed type. She does a better job of presenting the time aspect of the dialog, and since timing is one of the essential elements of comedy, that makes her dialog funnier.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I'm totally with you. At 48, I now believe all typography and all hand lettering should be specced by someone over 35.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I've never found SP difficult to read, but there are definitely comics I've had trouble getting into because of text I found difficult to read, so I understand your reaction.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

And Questionable Content's type slows me down much more. It looks like an ugly display font repurposed for text.

How did you feel about the type in Cerebus?

[avram]

That wasn't type; Cerebus was hand-lettered. (With occasional exceptions like the long text pieces.) And brilliantly, especially in the later storylines. Dave Sim may be the best letterer the comics field has ever seen.

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

I'd say Walt Kelly, but Sim did fantastic work, too. I wish I could hand letter.

And yeah, Something positive needs to hit the leading a bit.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

Huh. I loved Cerebus while I loved it, but frequently found it very difficult to read.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I read *all* comics online these days with Firefox's ImageZoom plugin to make them more readable.

[(Anonymous)]

Nice analysis.

"Sordid City Blues"'s text is well spaced and readable, but there's a kind of mechanical chilliness to it. "Templar, Arizona" is the friendliest looking, as well as being very readable.

Stefan

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

I believe Randy does the work in huge size and resizes down. Which is pretty common, but he also does the text at that size, too, and Photoshop isn't very kind to text when resizing. Penny Arcade is drawn at the huge size, but the text is lettered at the sizes it is rendered for.

I find it hard to read due to Randy's ability to pace that comic anymore. It's got Megatokyo syndrome, and how. I mostly read it from inertia.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Here's to legibility. I cringe at so much of the stuff that's online, scanned to "readable minus twenty percent." Seems like political cartoons are jammed in without considerations of being decipherable, and strip cartoons. The New Yorker collection put full-page cartoons down to miniscule size.

Resizing in Photoshop can be done, but doing it automatically in one operation is a way to make sure the program chooses the pixels to save according to its own weird algorithm. I learned that you reduce no more than 50% at a time, and sharpen between steps. (This is especially important when making a tiny icon with type in it.)

[iron-spike.livejournal.com]

Hi. I do Templar, Arizona (http://www.templaraz.com). Hope you don't mind me making a couple quick comments.

For the record, all of Templar's text, save for stuff on computer screens, is hand-done on the page. I think it looks better that way, more human. Just a personal preference. I sometimes shift the words around in Photoshop, maybe center 'em in the balloon a little better, but they're all real on paper somewhere.

Thank you for all the kind words, by the way. I really do spend a couple hours on every page, just doing the text. It's really nice to know I'm getting the desired effect, and that the work's appreciated.

[avram]

Thanks for putting in all that work!

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

Hand lettering in comics, done well, really enhances the comic. My own hand lettering is so bad that I resort to a font, but I feel like the ease of using a font maybe encourages new cartoonists who might be good at hand lettering not to bother. Thanks for being a good example!

[sajia.livejournal.com]

Hi, I've been lurking here for the last couple of weeks. I'm drafting a webcomic and I've learnt a lot from the sketches you post. I write very wordy dialogue, so today's post was very enlightening; I'll probably end up using font on top of scanned watercolor sketches because lettering would take up so much time. Thanks!

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

By the way, Milholland is currently experimenting with the type. Today's for example, has more leading (although it also has a harder-to-read quirky font used for a particular character).