Hyphenation

[fro]

I read Promethea this weekend and it had some awesome lettering by ol' Todd Klein. Great fonts all over the place, interesting dialogue balloons, pages that are almost entirely reliant upon the lettering for eye movement, everything. The story was cool (do we need a new word for Moore's particular brand of crazy?), and it still took me a while to figure out the layouts on some pages, but overall, awesome.

At any rate, I was completely surprised by how many hyphens were in the books. They were everywhere! Some of this, of course, is going to be due to Moore being a little verbose, but I was still surprised. My experience with hyphenation in both lettering for comics and typography/graphic design in general has always been that you avoid it at all costs. It detracts from readability, doesn't look good, etc. In Promethea, though, there were often several hyphenated words per pages, and sometimes they were pretty awkward and really seemed totally unnecessary - like a hanging "-ing." on the bottom line of a balloon. I can only assume this is due to Mr. Klein trying to crank out a whole lotta pages as quickly as possibly - you know, not taking a little extra time to readjust text boxes or manually force line returns.

It piqued my interest because I haven't seen it so heavily in a long time, Klein or not. I'm flipping through Sandman right now and am hard-pressed to find any hyphens that aren't already hyphenated compound words. Anybody else noticed this in other books, Klein or otherwise, or have different experiences with hyphenation?

[fro]

Forgot to say...I can understand the hyphenation in some cases. When you get hit with a line like, "It's the claustrophobificationary ray!" or the like in a panel that already has no space sometimes you just have to suck it up.

[Jason Arthur]

Yeah I try to avoid hypenation at all costs, but sometimes you'll get a writer who likes to put huge words at the end of a sentence... ugh.

If it's the last balloon of that panel you could butt the balloon to the bottom of the panel, but I'd avoid that when possible too.

Just always make sure you hyphenate properly (usually Adobe Illustrator does a good job of finding the break for you).

-- J

[Kep!]

I no longer avoid it...nor do I advocate it. In the interest of shape and flow, it's often necessary, and we can all agree on that, but it's more often with writers like Moore than Gaiman if only for the number of words per page (not that Gaiman's a slouch there either). If done well, it's not noticed...so use it as needed. But if you're doing it every, single panel, it's probably time to shrink your font a point or two.