What's your process? We all come up with ways of working that are better for us but one of the traditional issues for webcomics was always "digital Vs analogue". That's ALWAYS been more complex than it seems because no matter how analogue your working method is, it will HAVE to be digital at some point if it's a webcomic because the comic has to get online somehow. So there are zero fully analogue webcomics, all are digital to varying degrees. But it's even more complex when we're talking about lettering.

There are a lot of different ways to letter, you can draw a page with pens and pencils, write in all the the dialogue as you go (or type it out and print it etc.), and then digitise the comic page. Not many people do that now though. The conventional way is to add the text digitally: use some program like GIMP, Illustrator, InDesign, ToonBoom studio or whatever to give you a nice font and format things neatly into a speech bubble. Most people who work with pen and paper at least prefer to go digital for lettering because of how clean it looks and how customisable it is, as do those who work fully digitally. Though there are some of us who hand letter, writing out all the words, even though we work digitally, sort of going backwards in a way.

There are benefits to digital hand lettering when you can do it well: it looks more engaging to the reader (something very hard to do with font choices), it's FAR more customisable for the stye you want and far easier to fix errors and make changes because you can select, move, and replace individual letters on a finished page without going back to your working files. It also means that the lettering can be done all in the same app you used to draw the page so your process is much more streamlined. There's no auto spell check feature though so you have to be careful, as well as very neat and regular in your writing style.

That example just illustrates that the clear distinction between "digital and analogue" these days is largely false and it's more of a spectrum, like a lot of things. Digital tools have gotten so much better now that an artist's work looks the same whatever tools they use. And the convenience and power of at least colouring digitally on an analogue created page you've digitised to display online is too great not to pass up. For me it always came down to the fact that my work was ultimately going to be mainly displayed online so I wanted to retain the original quality as much as possible, which meant gradually transitioning to full digital, since a massive amount of the work I was doing on my pages was simply correcting for the issues caused by digitising pages.

How do you work and why?

The best off Gunwallace track this week was YOUR CHOICE - Get down with this dirty disco. Makes you want to dress in drag and get on the dancefloor. Originally from Quackcast 205, 9th of Feb, 2015.

Topics and shownotes

Links Pen or Digital (discussion in the forums) - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180188/?page=7#3029086 Lettering methods (discussion in the General Discussion thread) - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180279/

Featured comic: Bionic Age - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2026/jun/08/featured-comic-bionic-age/

Featured music: YOUR CHOICE - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/YOUR_CHOICE/ - by VinoMas, rated T.

Special thanks to: Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/ Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/ Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/

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