Best font for dialogues

[CyberLord]

We'll keep butting heads on this, Ben, as long as you keep regurgitating the same post every time lettering gets brought up around here. Your issue isn't with digital lettering, it's with shitty lettering. If the letterer has the skill and the will, then integrating sound effects and other flourishes into the art isn't difficult to do digitally.

Gotta' support InkThinker on this one. Digital lettering for sound effects just plain sucks! Maybe I am just a crotchety old man, but I have not liked sound effects in comics for a long while. Justice League #1 has a repetitive "BRATATATATAT" that just SCREAMS digital to me and it sucks! It's on multiple pages and it has no life!
I know they are trying to make these things look hand drawn so that they fit with the art but they continue to fail. Take the "THOOOM" when Green Lantern hits the ground. I know they are TRYING, trying my patience. The "THOOOM" does not fit. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
The "PING" when the critter inserts the Mother Box into the wall is the exact same "PING" two pages later when Batman is holding the Mother Box. Now I am willing to concede that this sameness does lend consistency to the sound since it is supposed to be emitted by the same device, but it is so hard-edged, as if the letterer did not have the skills to actually DRAW the sound effect and used a ruler. These digital sound effects are far too mechanical for my tastes, and yes that is a perception which makes it subjective.
Oh, well, I guess this is the way comics will be made in the future, just not my comics! I'll be using non-digital lettering. >8^D
Lettering is a PART of the art. So much so that many artists have stated that they include the word balloons in their roughs. If lettering is that important so early in the process and the art is hand-drawn, then the sound-effects, at a minimum, must be hand-drawn to complete the look.

CyberLord

[Mase]

*Puts on Team Finch T-shirt*

It depends on the level of looseness of the overall linework to me. For tight linework, say an old-school Dave Johnson or Cory Walker, hand lettering would stick out like a sore thumb. For looser work, say a Jim Mahfood or Kagan McLeod, digital sound FX would be a sin.

For the original question, I've been rolling with Blambot's Digital Strip for years now.

[Inkthinker]

Your issue isn't with digital lettering, it's with shitty lettering. If the letterer has the skill and the will, then integrating sound effects and other flourishes into the art isn't difficult to do digitally.

I got no problem with digitally integrated sound effects, so long as they're integrated. Most of the time I see canned, font-based pre-gen sound effects being pasted over artwork with no integration at all, and it's awful.

I don't care if they're generated digitally or not, so long as they integrate with the imagery. Hell, all my comics work is digitally drawn, and I put the sounds on Layers... it's not like it has to exist on the paper, if there's a letterer who's going to handle it effectively. Let the letterer do the graphic design work, it gives 'em something creative to do other than bubble-n-type.

But you can't tell me that canned, font-based sound effects are ever better than custom-drawn graphically-designed ones. It's fine if they're digitally-generated and added during the color phase, just not when they're poorly-integrated and badly designed (or not designed to fit the work at all, just pulled from a box of pre-generated examples) and slapped over the top, which happens all too often now.

I have no problem with digital lettering in terms of dialogue (and I've said so). It's what I've done for pretty much all of my own work, but only for dialogue.

And since the topic at hand IS dialogue, I guess I'm the bastard for segueing into the topic of sounds, it's not as if that was what Juggertha was looking into in the first place.

Sooo... mea maxima culpa.

Still a peeve. Still think I'm right. At least on the topic of sounds.