What challenges have you faced as manga letterer? If you're looking to get into the manga industry, internships are a great avenue, and many are now fully remote for the first time ever! I was offered the opportunity to try lettering after an internship with Kodansha Comics, and I've been lettering as a freelancer ever since.

This is my favorite part of lettering a book, but it's easy to sink days into matching the artwork exactly. It surprises most people to learn that it's the responsibility of the letterer to retouch art, since I guess you'd assume the art is always fully layered.Īgain, it varies based on publisher, but letterers often recreate sound effects to match the style and shape of the original Japanese. This means that everything in the script has to be manually removed and the art underneath retouched. It depends from publisher to publisher, but most art files are flattened. We work with editors to choose suitable fonts, and we format all of the text to be both easy to read and consistent. In addition to placing the dialogue you see in speech balloons, we're responsible for maintaining the design aesthetic of the whole comic. So it's more than just putting text in the speech bubbles? This includes any dialogue, signs, posters, phone screens, maps, etc. We're responsible for placing everything you see in English. We get the translated script and high-resolution art files from the editor, and we marry the two with InDesign and Photoshop. Manga letterers (also known as 'typesetters') place translations on the artwork. Recently she's also just released a font of her own intended for manga use! We thought we'd catch up with Sara over e-mail to find out how letterer can make or break a good localisation. Sara Linsley is a software developer and comic book letterer living in NYC, she has done lettering for manga including Sweat and Soap, Spoof on Titan, LDK and Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches. So we thought we'd catch up with a manga letterer to find out more about the process.

While people often consider the translation there's another part of the localisation process to consider, the letterer! All the words you read on the page aren't just magically put into place, there's actually a lot of art and craft to lettering a manga page. Localising manga is more than just buying the rights and getting it translated, there's also sorts of factors to consider to bring it to market.

What font is used for manga