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Here Cy Dethan interviews letterer Nic Wilkinson. Part of CBOs “Someone else interviews someone else” season.

My thanks to Nic and Cy!

Tell us who you are and what you did on Slaughterman’s Creed.

Umm, it wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything. You can’t prove…oh, oh, I see, right.

I’m Nic Wilkinson, letterer of Slaughterman’s Creed, and I’m here to help you read between the lines.

I’ve lettered a lot of Cy Dethan’s work, and quite a bit of Stephen Downey’s so we work like a well oiled machine. As you will see below, this book had some unique and deceptively complex challenges that made it great fun to get my teeth into.

You previously lettered Cancertown: An Inconvenient Tooth for the Dethan/Downey team and that had some very unusual lettering in terms of the Players and the Residents. What made this book a challenge?

I think I’m right in saying that Slaughterman’s Creed is the first book I’ve lettered that’s been set entirely in the “real world”, or at least the first book set in a world where none of the realism is magic.

As such this throws up some interesting questions when approaching the lettering.

Lettering is an odd convention, being a “visual approximation of sound”, and that’s even before we get into the high weirdness of sound effects. When a book is “unreal” in its setting or characters, the “desperation device” (as Will Eisner probably quite rightly called it) of word balloons does not stand out as particularly alien. There’s a whole lot of other unusual stuff going on to distract you from how the “soundtrack” is being presented – there are new worlds to explore, new rules to learn and all sorts of new creatures to meet.

When working on a “real world” book, things are different. Readers already know how that world works, what it looks like and how things in it behave. Consequently, the intrusion of an artificial convention like “lettering” over the visuals can smack a reader round the head hard enough to shake them out of the story unless you are very careful with it.

How did you go about making the lettering “real” in that sense? Most of your lettering work has been on Sci-Fi, horror and fantasy stories. In fact, thrown in at the deep end, you cut your lettering teeth on Starship Troopers. Did you find that a lot of the conventions and techniques you developed for these genres were not available to you on this book?

Lettering in comics is the thread that stitches the artwork to the dialogue and captions, it has a lot in common with interface design. In an “unreal” story it almost becomes part of the artwork, using different fonts, sizes and colours to convey information about the sound and its effect on the characters.

However, to keep a sense of the “real” I couldn’t use a whole variety of fonts and colours as I have elsewhere. Human beings speaking may have different accents, different pitches to their voices and things like that but basically they all sound like humans – humans speaking 20^th century English in this case. Another consideration is reader expectation. Convention says that humans talk in dialogue fonts. Gods and monsters need to sound (meaning the lettering needs to look) appreciably different to convey aspects of their characters, powers, size and so forth. However, now readers have all learned that if you employ those techniques as a letterer, you are indicating to them that the character is not like the others in some way, and they will be waiting to see how that pays off. Everything on the page is part of a communication with the reader and, quite fairly, they will look for that communication to make some sort of sense!

There is a lot of storytelling through colour in Slaughterman’s Creed, used to indicate the “domains” or “influence” of certain characters, the emotional tone of scenes and to give the reader visual cues as to where we are in the timeline as the story does not unfold in a linear fashion.

This complex visual grammar basically rules out any use of colour in the lettering. It would be fighting for attention with the information being conveyed in the main action on the page – sometimes conflicting or contrasting, sometimes conforming, but pretty much always confusing to the reader, which is the last thing we want!

What did you find was unique or different in lettering this book?

It has been said in many reviews that Cy Dethan’s characterisation through dialogue is one of the particular strengths of his writing. As you might expect, lettering them, with their many distinctive voices, is like getting to know new friends.

Cy writes to some kind of pounding, primal pulse with this one and Slaughterman’s Creed  is an extremely  rhythmic book. It has plots and subplots turning through different cycles, their often surprisingly interwoven frequencies an intrinsic part of the storytelling. This intricate control of time and timing can be seen in every aspect of the book – whether in the initial written plot construction, the artists picking up the threads in page composition or the action in the panels and the way that people speak.

Using the lettering to bring out this delicate pacing was a fascinating exercise. The characters, with one exception (and we’ll come onto him in a minute), live in a world bound by strict, if unspoken, rules and hierarchies. Transgression is a matter of mortal peril. Who speaks, what they say, when they say it, in what order and to whom is as fraught with peril and politics as it was in the courts of the most dangerous tyrants.

With no “audio”, the job of the letterer is to convey “time through space”. As such, finding ways to illustrate this complex and timeless dance of fear, respect, ambition and rebellion under the circumstances of the story was a very satisfying undertaking.

So, you’re saying there’s more to lettering than “copying and pasting the script” then? Tell us a bit about what a letterer brings to the storytelling process itself.

In the same way as a misstep or ill-timed comment could ruin your life in this world, a misplaced balloon could give a whole different slant on the character interaction, inflecting the scene and changing the feel of the story away from the intentions of the writer and artist.

A letterer has a lot of unseen, and often unconsidered, responsibility in that sense. A half-inch difference in placement between two balloons can mean the difference between a nervously eager gasp, a respectful and considerate pause or a deliberate act of quietly insolent rebellion.

All of that should be invisible. It shouldn’t jump out at the reader with an “oh, I see what she did there”. It should mesh so seamlessly with what the characters are actually saying and doing that it seems natural. It’s only when you want to make a contrast between words and action that you deliberately subvert that flow to give the reader the (hopefully subliminal) impression that something is not quite right here.

In the same way that body language and spatial relationships to other characters show what a character is doing (and possibly thinking) and where they fit in the action of the moment, how their lettering is positioned around them and other characters illustrates how they speak, not just what they say.

Can you give us some specific examples?

Let’s talk a bit about my personal favourite, Mr Green, first. I’ll try to do this delicately, without spoilers.

Mr Green is an antagonist in the story. He is the wild element of chaos and nature thrown into this ordered and regulated world. Where I have talked about the musical qualities and rhythms of the book, he is the counter-melody – the offbeat, the contrast to the main harmony. Visually, he stands out in terms of colour and design.

To express this in terms of his lettering, his rhythms often break into those of the other characters. His balloons might bump into or cross those of others, they might have slightly “uncomfortable” spacing with pauses where he is not paying attention, or sudden outbursts. He often talks “over his shoulder” or at an angle to the action, to give the impression of his being in the world of the gangsters, but not of it.

In contrast, most of Lenny Addison’s speech is shown to be linear. He is a straightforward man with solid ideas. His men respect him. What he says is important. His word is law. The placing of his balloons is proud and strong.

Lewis is a man of ambition, with plans of his own. The placement of his balloons shows his more subtle nature, fitting neatly in the places they need to be, sometimes wrapping themselves around the characters and action, sometimes keeping aside and sometimes getting between people or closing them together. They are always in motion, manoeuvring and taking up deliberate positions.

The book is non-linear. Did that have an impact on the lettering in any way?

Time, of course, changes the way the way the way the characters look, act and express themselves. This is the first time I have done a book that takes place over a long enough time for the characters to notably age and be seen in different periods of their lives. Seeing how they develop, and how their speech changes as a result of their experiences, was a intriguing thing to play with.

As mentioned, the story is not revealed in a linear fashion and lettering the “told stories” in the form of various flashbacks is unlike the “live dialogue” of the present. Dialogue brings time into the borders of a panel, elbowing its way into the spatial dimensions of the art. Caption narration of a person telling the story does not relate to specific things said at a specific time. When a person tells a story they build up a picture and, as the panel borders dissolve (giving us something more akin to montage), the lettering becomes freer in form and interacts with the art in a more organic fashion.

There are no sound effects in Slaughterman’s Creed. Why is that?

There are no “sound effects” as such in Slaughterman’s Creed, in keeping with it being a realistic book, but there is sound that needs expressing that is not dialogue. In the cases of everyday noises the artwork handles the heavy lifting. We know what it sounds like when a car door slams or an engine starts. These are “natural” noises with no narrative function (a sound with a narrative function would be something like a creaking that could be a floorboard when the girl is hiding under the bed from the killer) and do not need specific attention drawn to them.

However, we do have sounds that have a narrative function and with which people are not familiar enough to fill in the blanks themselves. In this case they are mostly to do with the equipment used in slaughtering animals.

The route we took with this was to express the sound, and the effect, through the noises people make when they are used on them. For example, the buzzing scream made by an unfortunate soul with electrical sheep-stunning tongs clamped around his head hopefully not only gives the impression of the noise he makes, but also conveys its quality, pitch and meaning. The noise “sounds” the way it does through the visual design of the scream as it shatters out of its containing balloon.

That’s probably enough about the lettering now. I hope you enjoy the book and don’t find any typos!