The One Thing That Instantly Improves Your Comics: Better Lettering

4 Techniques to Make Your Lettering Clearer

Lettering is the thing I see beginning cartoonists struggle with most often. But the good news? It’s also one of the easiest ways to make your comics look more polished.

I’m not immune to messy lettering myself! Most of the comics I share on Substack start as diary comics, where I’m not careful about my lettering—like in the example on the left. But when I take the extra step of adding my KWM font (right), the difference is huge: it looks more polished and, most importantly, is much easier to read.

It actually took me about a year of publishing this newsletter before I finally forced myself to clean up my lettering—whiting out my messy handwriting in Photoshop and replacing it with my font.

Legibility is everything.

Don’t make your reader work to decipher what you’re saying! It brings them out of the comic. Even if your handwriting is an illegible scrawl (mine certainly can be), your comic’s lettering doesn’t have to be.

Here are some ways to improve your lettering:

1. Use a guide to letter your comics

This is the simple method I use for hand-lettering in my graphic novels. I first draw a simple guide and then use that to letter:

Then I turn off the guide layer:

If I were lettering an entire book this way, I’d create a reusable guide for consistency.

I use this technique for my hand-lettered narration, weaving it into the landscape and backgrounds of my graphic novels in unconventional shapes—like in this example from Tuck Everlasting: The Graphic Novel:

Since the shape of the text isn’t straight, the guides are even more important for clarity and readability.

2. Trace over a font

Cartoonist Zander Cannon introduced me to this trick: Find a digital font you like, place it on its own layer, lower the opacity, and trace over it by hand. This keeps your lettering looking natural but gives you the consistency of a font.

3. Purchase a font

Using a pre-made font is the easiest way to handle lettering in comics. Blambot offers some great comics-specific fonts, but I’ve found they don’t match the mood or art of my graphic novels. There are plenty of font resources online, but I haven’t yet found one I love for comics lettering. If you’ve discovered a great lettering font, I’d love to hear about it—let me know in the comments!

4. Make your own font

Since I don’t love the time it takes to hand-letter, creating my own font has been a game-changer.

For The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, I designed a font using Calligraphr to evoke the protatgonist Nick Carraway’s handwriting. My publisher later adjusted it to improve readability, partly because Calligraphr doesn’t support kerning pairs, which help a font look more natural.

Here’s how it appeared in the final book—plus a bit of my hand-lettering in the trees for contrast:

Want to make your own font?

If you’re curious about lettering and font creation, I’ll be co-hosting a lettering workshop with cartoonist and designer Susannah Hainley on March 25. We’ll walk you through making your own font using the FontSelf iPad app and best practices for incorporating them into your comics

We’re offering this workshop because having our own fonts has been such a huge help in our comics, and we want to share what we’ve learned!

If you’re looking for more personalized feedback on your lettering—or any other aspect of your comics—I also offer comics coaching sessions to help artists refine their work.

What do you notice about comics lettering?

• What stands out to you about lettering in graphic novels?

• Is there anything lettering-related you’d like me to cover in a future post?

Drop your thoughts in the comments!

Autobiographix Interview:

I recently did a fun visual interview about my comics journey and style with Autobiographix. Check it out here:

Leif Love:

Leif looking dignified in the woods along the Mississippi in Minneapolis—where the snow has suddenly vanished after a warm spell.

Take care and keep creating!

-Katharine

P.S. Pre-orders are up for my graphic novel adaptation of Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt! Pre-orders make a huge difference for the success of a book, so if you plan to buy a copy, it would help me a lot if you pre-ordered it.