But there are plenty of people working in comics -- many whose work shows up on the printed page -- who are rarely noticed, let alone singled out for praise. And, strangely enough, that's exactly as it should be. For instance ...
... Letterers. Bad lettering constantly calls attention to itself: individual letters within works vary in size, words are crammed together, or lines within balloons aren't straight. The reader, as he or she struggles to make out what is being said, is constantly pulled out of the story and reminded that they're reading a comic rather than living a story. Good lettering, on the other hand, is rarely noticed. It flows directly into the reader's brain -- smoothly blending with the visual information from the art -- where it is interpreted as characters' voices or sounds without making the reader consciously aware of the act of reading.
There are production artists who can provide a wide variety of services, from pasting word balloons onto already inked pages to performing art corrections such as whiting-out tiny mistakes to (in extreme cases) redrawing whole panels. (This usually happens at the last minute when a problem has been discovered after it's too late to send the art back to the artists for correction.)
Good colorists, too, enhance the comics-reading experience in a variety of ways of which most readers are unaware. Beyond making the artists' work more eye-pleasing, they help to create the illusion of depth upon a two-dimensional plane. They subtly highlight characters or objects that are important to a story -- drawing a reader's eye to them without alerting the reader to the manipulation. At their best they clarify, add dimension to, and even help render the art.
Working hand-in-hand with the old-fashioned paint and color-code colorists these days are the color separators, or computer colorists. They add color to scanned images of the black-and-white art, using the latest in computer technology to produce computer files from the colorist's guides or create effects that were impossible to produce just a few years ago.
Add to the list: a designer who puts together covers, credit pages, letter columns, and ads; the service bureau team that turns the computer files into actual four-color film; and the folks in pre-press that ready the film for printing and create color proofs and dummy books from which the editor makes final checks.
I haven't mentioned the editor yet, but he or she is there every step of the way, from before the first word of a script is written until the film goes out the door to the printer. Backed by assistant editors and proofreaders, the editor often leaves his or her mark on every page -- a decision to change a word or a line or an entire image (or to leave it all just as it is!) -- hopefully all for the betterment of the book. But, if an editor is doing their job correctly, their presence should be completely transparent to the reader; less noticeable than the best lettering, less detectable than the tiniest art correction.
And then, of course, there are all those people who don't directly affect the way a comic book looks or reads, but whose efforts make all of the above possible: the people in marketing, sales, licensing, accounting, operations, shipping, management information systems (so that's what "m.i.s." means!), and administration.
Not that the average reader should even notice ...
-- Randy Stradley
transparent guy