The Sausage is Made 2: Ideation/Revision; To the Letter

Hello again, dear Howlers. I told you I'd be back.

We have a breakneck schedule of posts for you this week, second of which is this one about the reservoir wall, Baby Lorn's trash stache, and a little bit about lettering theory.

So Giannis' first pass at the first page and castle occupied by Vulcan looked like this:

Not too different from the final version, truth be told. Giannis sent this during the Great Signathon of 2025, when Pierce and Joel were here in Tvlse signing somewhere between 12 and 14,000 books for our lovely customers, many of whom are amongst your number. Emily and I were of course in the warehouse too, hurling your precious tomes at the creators and thence to the packing line. There's stuff about this on the Instagram, I think, it was a bit of a schlep.
Anyway, because Pierce was right in the room with me and sometimes we all needed to take breaks to rest our wrists lest they fall completely off, I showed him Giannis' roughs for this chapter and he said the reservoir surrounding the castle needed to be much larger. Being something of an artist myself, I dashed off the following:

This was at like 3x5in maybe? Anyway, I came in the same day with an additional idea. Lorn is 17-18 years old at the time of this Episode. I thought back to the way I looked when I was 17:

This was from a production of Clue I was in during HS. My director was real specific that everybody needed to be cleanshaven (though he later had me in a fake mustache), so my habitual dusting of upper lip pubes was absent for this photo. I don't know that non-theatre photos of me from this period exist, which is fine in my book. Anyway, I usually had a gross little crop of hairs on my upper lip. Remembering that, I dashed this off:

Which pretty quickly got Howler One's approval. So we sent these things on to Giannis, who eventually churned out the page you read last month:

Which, of course, brings us to the tweedier part of today's post: LETTERING! aww yiss

So okay. A think you may or may not have thought about when you've read comics is that there is a specific pattern in which you approach the page, whether you're a words-first reader, an images-first reader, or, rarest of the rare, word-and-image simultaneously, it remains the same.

You read in a zig-zag, unless a very talented and innovative cartoonist (Chris Ware, Tillie Walden) directs you in a different path, which is hard to pull off and also would not work in our favor in the Book of Lorn, which is not a terribly formally concerned work.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because a good letterer--which I am trying my best to be-- will both use and subvert these laylines that exist in the page to guide reader's eye through the text on the page in the correct order, while ideally leaving enough space for the artist's work to breathe.

So the lettering looked like this.

Ideally, there would only be around 25-40 words per panel. Closer to 50-75 in those lower two, but it's okay, these things happen, early days yet, I'm not trying to cut things if I don't have to, know what I mean? So that path looks like this:

Which is not quite the original path along the reading lines I mentioned above, but is relatively close:

That snag in the third panel gave me gray hairs as I was trying to solve how to make it work. I hope this solution worked well for you, dear reader! I had further issues when lettering the third Episode, about which you will hear more at a later date.

There are a lot of other extremely finicky niceties about lettering that I can share with you later too, if you like, but I don't want to overstay my welcome. So.
Watch this space tomorrow (3 December 2025) for important info for $15 and $30 backers, and don't forget about that stream on the IG Friday!

Till tomorrow then,
HLHS
pgc