From Hell
Saturday, 23 January 2010
If things work out as planned I will do the lettering of the Dutch edition of the comic book ”From Hell”, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Eddie Campbell.
The cover for the Dutch edition is none of my business, but having nothing better to do I noticed that the spacing of the title bothered me. The word “from” is not equal as wide as the “hell” in the typeface used here.
I tried to make it look better with a hand made letter:
For some reason I am never asked to make book titles for comic books (or any other books). That makes me the wrong person to say that I find many comic book titles unattractive, because the typeface doesn’t fit the drawings. But that is what I think: many comic book covers would be better off with a hand lettered logo.
Now the original title was left anyway, I made several other sketches:
And finally I made a sketch for a title that would fill the complete cover:
When I was editor of the Dutch edition of (A Suivre) in the eighties, I got mini-tapes with a few hours of interview that Martijn Daalder had done with Alan Moore. Only a fraction of his talks could be used in the magazine but it was an avalanche of ideas that impressed me very much. He talked about his series ”Big numbers”, a comic book about mathematics that he back then planned to make with Bill Sienkiewicz. Stupidly, I didn’t make a copy of those tapes.
Alan Moore doesn’t like to do interviews, but here are two that showed up on YouTube: