Chris Ware, Use of Type

Use of Type

Lettering: Visualising Sound in Comics

‘Where the text is placed and how the text is lettered is as important as the words themselves and can help the reader to make meaning of the text within the context of the story being told.’ [1]

Text and type layout is a key feature that goes throughout all of Chris Ware’s work which is why I’ve identified it as another methodology. From looking at pages in Chris Ware's 'Jimmy Corrigan Smartest Kid on Earth' I have picked particular pages where use of type is strong.

Figure 1 - Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth.

 

Figure 2 - Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth.

In the particular strip we can look at how the format of the text makes you read the text and the images and how a reader interprets them. ‘Well’ is a completely different, curly font that sets a different tone, a lighter note, hence the lighter type. Throughout for a different tone he uses a different text.

Similarly, here, there is a simple lettering spaced in different ways, formatted in bold, in different fonts. Each different style of how a word is presented is used to represent a different tone.

Figure 3 - Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth.

The letters that stand out the most here is “Meanline” which breaks up the panel to set a different scene somewhere completely different. 

Figure 4 - Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth.

This is my own example of text in a scene. This is a short story about a girl in love with dancing and the words are helping illustrate her movement in term of her smile and her dance. I also used the same colour pallet as Chris Ware has in example 3.

Reference

[1] Jacobs, D. (2008)

Image References

Figure 1 - 4 - pages from Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth.

Bibliography

- Jacobs, D. (2008) Lettering: Visualizing sound in comics. Available at: http://uwindsorcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/lettering-visualizing-sound-in-comics.html (Accessed: 2 November 2016).

- Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth. London: Jonathan Cape. (Accessed: 2 November 2016).