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When people read manga, they often focus on the Instagram caption-worthy one-liners and larger-than-life illustrations that fill their pages. What usually goes unnoticed in picking up a manga is the work that goes into its lettering and graphic design, done by the folks who pour their craftsmanship into typesetting popular Japanese manga for Western audiences. We spoke with professional letterers Brandon Bovia (The Guy She Was Interested in Wasnt a Guy at All, Dragon Ball Super, Kaiju No. 8), Evan Hayden (Battle Angel Alita, Land of Lustrous, Akira), Sara Linsley (Kamudo), Aidan Clarke (Otaku Elf, Neo Faust, Les Miserable), Barri Shrager (Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?), Kyla Aiko (Dandadan, Gokurakugai), and Finn K. (Shinobi Undercover, RuriDragon) about the challenges of typesetting the best manga in the world. Manga Lettering in a Nutshell The job of a manga letterer is a collaborative process between publishers and translators where typesetters bring together all the minutiae of text folks would read in a mangaeven if it means designing fonts themselves. If you look at a page of manga, virtually all the text you can read in English was placed there by a letterer. Letterers are localizing everything from restaurant signs to handwritten love letters. If the reader is meant to read it, then the letterer has to localize it. The kinds of things we have to localize vary from genre to genre, Linsley said. Lettering is an art, and sloppy lettering can ruin a localization. Sara Linsley Sara Linsleys lettering for Pupposites Attract by Hono Natsuna Kodansha Using programs like InDesign, PhotoShop, and Acrobat, letterers localize the typography of a manga for Western readers. Depending on the publisher, a letterers graphic design and typography job description may also include working on the manga covers, table of contents, and other pieces of iconography beyond setting dialogue in speech bubbles and translating onomatopoeia sound effects. Furthermore, letters are also tasked with stylizing the font in the manga. Although this process sounds like it could be straightforwardswapping out Japanese with Englishthe lettering process is actually a complex amalgamation of art and science.Theres a misconception that fan translation is the same as professional translation, and those experiences are used to make assumptions about the manga industry. For example, some folks believe that the same person will translate and letter a page, when thats very rare in the professional sphere. Some folks assume that lettering is easy, or that its just copying and pasting text from the translated script. Lettering is an art, and sloppy lettering can ruin a localization, Linsley said. Another element of manga lettering that differentiates itself from lettering in Western comic books is that workers must adapt every word in manga art to English. In laymans terms, manga letterers must erase handwritten Japanese text elements and replace them with English text elements. This extends beyond dialogue in speech bubbles to translating signsbe they on the road, or in apps and text on smartphones (which can be super tricky)and flamboyant sound effects.Brandon Bovias lettering for The Hunters Guild: Red Hood by Yuki Kawaguchi. Shonen Jump Even if the original manga page was created digitally and the sound effects are on a separate layer from the character and background art, those layered files are seldom available to companies that want to localize the manga. The act of erasing and redrawing manga art is often referred to as retouching, and manga letterers are sometimes credited as having done lettering and touch-up art,' Aiko said. As the letterer of Yen Press popular girls love manga, The Guy She Was Interested in Wasnt a Guy at All, Bovia can attest to the challenging aspect of retouching a manga whose identity is tied to the green layer associated with the identity of its busy panels. If something needed to be retouched, it needed to be retouched twiceboth in black and white and green. Then add the green back into the new English text, Bovia said. The final result ended up being a lot of fun, but that one really pushed me to my limit. And I was juggling eight other books at the same time.Brandon Bovias lettering for The Guy She Was Interested in Wasnt a Guy at All by Sumika Arai Yen Press On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hayden goes the extra mile by hand-drawing his work using a bounty of ink pens on paper, especially if hes working on an older manga. If Im working on a classic manga, I really want to make things look as not digital as possible. I try to avoid using fonts for my sound effects. On Ashita no Joe, Im doing all the sound effects by hand and ink, which takes a long time, but thats how the original artist did it, Hayden said. A modern manga looks fine with modern fonts, but an older one doesnt. Thats personal preference.Ink-drawn manga lettering for Ashita no Joe. Evan Hayden While publishers have streamlined some of the day-to-day lettering processes by using Wild Words as their default font, there are areas of specificity between publishers. For example, manga publisher Seven Seas requires letterers to use 100% auto leading, whereas Yen Press instructs them to use font size plus one for leading. That results in very different-looking implementations of the same font between those publishers, Clarke said. Adding font standards in the mix with other overarching graphic design faux pas and no-noslike the ongoing debate over the implementation of the dreaded cross Is use-case in manga, wrapping of text, over-hyphenated words, and other niggling graphic design annoyancescan go unnoticed by the everyday reader but stick out like a sore thumb to a letterer.Some folks assume that lettering is easy, or that its just copying and pasting text from the translated script. Lettering is an art, and sloppy lettering can ruin a localization, Shrager said. Barri Shragers lettering for Meda-Ude: Mechanical Arms by Yoshino Koyoka. Azuki Manga Getting work consistently hasnt been an issue. Getting paid in a timely manner has been. Finn K. Pay, Work, and Life Balance While being a manga letterer might sound like a fun gig anyone would be lucky to have, much like with any job, balancing work, pay, and safeguarding ones personal life can be a tumultuous balancing act. For starters, a weekly 19 or 20-page series can pay a letterer $4-20 per page depending on the publisher and scope of the work. A monthly volume can take 30-50 hours on the light end, and 70-100 hours on the heavier end to complete within a months deadline. Depending on how demanding the project is, monthly pay can wildly vary, with rates at $1,000 (or lower) to $2,000 (again, depending on the project). Mind you, some of these rates havent changed much since 2013 for letterers. I feel like if I had a few more series that paid well enough, I would make this a full-time job with a very small yearly salary (were talking $40-60,000 max). But currently I do other side hustles to earn [more] money. Workload-wise you can easily spend more than a typical 40 hours a week and not be making nearly the same as someone working an office job, Shrager said. I would even say that $1000 these daysthings are expensivedoesnt take you as far as it used to when I started [in 2017], Bovia said.Barri Shragers lettering for My Dear Detective Mitsukos Case Files by Natsumi Ito. Azuki Manga Requesting time extensions from a publisher isnt like pulling teeth because most production schedules have a built-in cushion for emergencies. However, even this security blanket has an element of a double-edged sword. As a freelancer, you dont want to ask for extensions too often. If youre consistently behind on your work, clients can and will drop you from their projects, Linsley said.In addition to managing their time on a manga project, letterers must consider the amount of work they are taking on from publishers and meet deadlines, as no letterer works on only one manga at a time. If you really want to do your best for something, then you got to put in some incredibly long hours. Whether that means youre lettering a manga or whether it means youre making the next Grand Theft Auto game. People have to work crushing hours to make that happen, Hayden said. And if youre a freelancer, youre getting whatever youre getting, whether you do it quick or slow. You have to force yourself to try to work fast, which sometimes can lead to lower quality, which doesnt make you feel very good.Sara Linsleys lettering for Kamudo by Akira Himekawa. Viz Manga Despite putting in what is akin to full-time hours, most letterers are contract workers laboring on multiple manga chapters and books simultaneously to make ends meet. At the same time, some letterers jerry-rig their workflow so that theyre ostensibly working a full-time job lettering. Rather than feeling like the industry, which has had its systems in place for 20 to 30 years, is making strides to be equitable for letterers, most feel like theyre taking strides in the opposite direction. While it might seem like big-money manga titles would be able to provide full-time pay for letterers, the only company that hires full-time in the United States is porn. Fakku, the largest English hentai manga and doujinshi publisher, is one of the only places that hires letterers full-time. The manga industry is notorious for contractor-only work; its pretty cutthroat. Right from when we started publishing manga 10 years ago, I had a goal to improve the industry and make this a real career for people, Fakku founder Jacob Grady told io9. He continued: All of our typesetters are full-time salaried employees, with health insurance/vision/dental all 100% paid by the company with a 401k retirement plan. The goal is really to make this a long-term career for people, and provide job stability for our employees. While there will certainly never be any shortage of readers wanting to read manga for the plot, most manga letterers are contract workers or freelancers who try to make ends meet by supplementing their income with a second job. Its a really hard thing to make ends meet with. I know a number of people who have that as their full-time job, and there are only a select few of them that I dont see getting actively crushed by it, Clarke said. Ive been able to make it work, but if just a few things were to change in my life, it would be more difficult. Kyla Aiko Freelance letterers can face instances where invoices arent paid out promptly or piecemeal, making the work process all the more challenging. Manga lettering is my main source of income, and while what Im paid works for me most the time, its not my only source. I have a part-time job that Ive held the entire length of my lettering career. Part of the reason is because, while getting work consistently hasnt been an issue, getting paid in a timely manner has been and thats a little stressful even if the moneys good for me, Finn K. said.He continued: On average, it takes three weeks for an invoice to come through for me; sometimes I wait a month. The longest Ive had to wait was a little over two months, and that was hard. While the pay at bigger publishers is more rewarding for most letterers, getting paid in unpredictable timeframes makes the cycle of finding more work and paying bills a stressful ordeal, to say the least. Despite this, letterers balance their workload by typesetting manga monthly or weekly. Sara Linsleys lettering for Dandadan by Yukinobu Tatsu. Shonen Jump If a publisher wants to know how to produce manga faster and cheaper, ask your employees, not an AI startup. Sara Linsley AI Is Not a Solution As the use of AI spreads in nearly every arena of entertainment, tech startups like Orange, Inc. have become pervasive in the manga industry. While companies of this ilk promote their services as a solution to get more under-appreciated manga localized to people in a timely fashion, letterers feel they are no more than a grift. In opposition to publishers eyeing up AI start-ups as a means to maximize production, letterers feel publishers should open up lines of communication with their employees (i.e., letterers) and ask them for solutions the industry is facing. People are interested in comics because they are a form of art. Theyre not just content. They are something that people have put a lot of thought, care, and effort into creating, Clarke said. Not trying to match that passion and effort in the presentation is disrespectful to the people who created these comics in the first place. Automation is a very useful tool that individuals can use within their workflows, but consigning so much of that creative process over to automated methods robs it of that spark.Despite the encroachment of AI, the manga industry faces other persistent issues. As mentioned earlier, low rates are a big one, making the role of a letterer both mentally and physically taxing for workers. Rates are fairly stagnant. Ive seen companies make efforts to raise rates, but its been a slow process. As new companies enter the manga localization market, sometimes it seems like rates are at a race to the bottom, Aiko said. It would be great to see manga lettering rates catch up to even the low end of Western comic lettering rates. Linsley added, The pay is so low that letterers have to overload themselves. I had to stop lettering as my main source of income because I was working 70-hour weeks just to make an average income with no benefits. In tandem with low rates, letters feel like the industrys structure, which relies on contract work from typesetters, prevents years of knowledge to get passed on to letterers in a mentorship capacity outside of folks hitting colleagues up on social media.Over my years of lettering manga, I think, because there isnt any sort of mentorship, you have a new letterer starting from scratch. That doesnt have to be the case. There can be systems in place to ensure people can do this long term as a career, Bovia said. Barri Shragers lettering for Hikaru in the Light! by Mai Matsuda. Azuki Manga Publishers Should Invest in Workers Rather than waiting for solutions to manifest, letterers propose ways the industry can improve and prevent the above challenges from persisting, starting with investing in workers. Letterers we spoke to proposed publishers consult with them for solutions, more open calls for letterers, keeping lines of communication open between contractors and in-house employees, allowing freelancers to negotiate wages, and raising wages to match the modern cost of living. There are publishers out there thatll [hire you] for $600, $500, $400, which is really not much money for your time. If youre just starting out, its really tempting to take those low rates if youre not being offered anything else, Bovia said. Because theres no career path here, its just down to luck and being in the right place at the right time. That doesnt feel like the best way to run things to me. While much of the above can deter any bright-eyed hopeful looking to dip their toes into the profession, every letterer we spoke to encouraged folks to make time for their hobbies and not sacrifice their precious time (and weekends) for endless work.Youve got to do what youve got to do to pay the bills, but you also have to respect yourself as a human being, an artist, and a citizen to get enough money to live a life, Hayden said. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
