Many readers might not be aware, but my wife Meghan is getting her master’s degree in architecture (M.S., not M.Arch, for those who care…). So there’s not just one Kleon in our household who can draw!

Tonight I missed the bus and didn’t make it down to Vizthink, so I hung out with Meg down in the studio. She was using this crazy apparatus to do lettering:

It’s called a pantograph, or “Leroy” (named after the dude who invented it, I’d guess). It’s kind of like a compass: you basically trace a lettering template with a metal point, and the rapidograph pen follows along. I gave it a try…

…and I decided there was no way in hell I’d have the patience to do technical drawing! No thanks!

Dig my woman’s skills, though:

At one point she called me over and said, “Here, this will appeal to your sense of humor.”

She knows me well.

David Heatley has a cool post about hand-lettering, and points out his mentor, Robert Wakeman. For me, hand-lettering is an essential part of comics: the words need to look like they were drawn by the same hand as the art, or the whole “unity of style” is shot.

Even when I’m doing my woodcut-style comics I letter by hand. Here’s a comics page erased to show only the lettering:

Here’s one of my cut-out fictions, done spontaneously by carving out the words as I went along:

Ray Fenwick does comics which are almost exclusively defined by his hand-lettering. Great stuff.