Confessions of a Manga Letterer

I just spent an hour and a half tweaking six letters to be a crisp 255% of their normal size. You'd think this wouldn't be that big a deal--just click on the type, use the scale function, and there you go. But nope, not this time.

You see, back in spring of '06 or so, half-way through volume 3, Claymore's FX style changed from hand-drawn random and organic FX to using type. I didn't like the change at all, the type was so vanilla, cold, and boring. Besides, my specialty was hand-drawn FX, right? That's why I was hired for Nana, for Skip and Clay. I didn't want to do regular old text FX like 98% of the letterers out there. So I compromised. I drew my own vanilla type-ish FX, and showed them to Clay Editor #1. She thought it was a nice mix of the original and my style, and made sure to get approval from higher up for my kinda-type-but-still-hand-drawn FX. They had no problem, so we were good to go!!!!!

Now, almost two years later, I realize....I should have swallowed my purist pride and just gone to type. Ooog.

( Hindsight is always 20/20, ne? )

If only, if only....