Take a look at this climactic scene from The Watchmen lettered by Dave Gibbons…

Look at how much work the letters are actually doing. From Rorschach’s droning rise in intensity to Doctor Manhattan’s attempt at humanity to the final cry in the last panel.

The penciller, inker, colorist and writer are all contributing to that scene in definite ways, but Gibbons is really carrying the pace and intensity of that scene.

This scene from Doctor Strange #171 lettered by Artie Simek shows the broad range of tools in a letter’s toolbox.

This page simply could not be digitally lettered. So much iconic Marvel style would have been lost in the process.

Imagine “Dormammu!” and “Next: The Prize Is…. Earth!” in stock digital lettering. That would just be wrong.

Anyway, hand lettering is slowly becoming a lost art. When I see a properly hand lettered comic these days, I think it just adds so much.

Color was transferred from a colorist’s work by transcribers with wide interpretive latitude, through a bizarre technical process in which these transcribers would actually color four versions of the same page – only in red.

That is, one version of the page would have red colored into all the shapes where the colorist suggested a color that included blue. Another would be a page colored red wherever a color containing yellow appeared. And so forth. These pages were photostated successively, with the eventual product coming out in approximately the pattern the colorist suggested. This was never very effective, and severely limited the colors available. And then the low cost pulp stock invariably bled colors and lines.

So there were few options available when determining the hair and eye color of a main character who was supposed to reflect an Anglo-Saxon ideal. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman all had black (actually dark blue) hair and blue eyes. Barry Allen’s hair was yellow and no one is quite sure what color his eyes were. Batman is the only one of these characters whose origins actually suggest this ethnic ideal. Superman is an alien and probably should have something eccentric about his physicality besides the super-powers. Wonder Woman is Greek/North African and should probably look kind of Sicilian at the very least.