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Why does the Lettering for Tracyverse comics take so long?
🕑 Added 2024-02-24 19:16:32 +0000 UTCWell, there's a lot of reasons.
To begin with, my comics workflow uses a 21st-century version of the original Marvel Method, where "lettering" is actually when most of the actual textual "scripting" occurs: who says what, specific word choices, jokes, erotic phrasings, etc.
Of course, a lot of magic happens BEFORE that stage. Most of my "production scripts" exist as outlines and layouts for the artists, guiding what happens on each page of the story, and the main topic of the talk for the scenes, but it tends to leave the precise dialogue for later.
I go to great lengths to try to do something different with my erotic efforts. I always aim to avoid the "mix-and-match/plug-and-play" matchups that other so many creators exhibit and bring something unique to my stories, being it thematically, scene-wise, presentation, characters involved, etc.
In these +200 comics, my writing has had fourth-wall-breaking Dead/Gwenpool comics, continuity-heavy "What If?"s, slice-of-life meet-ups, lovey-dovey unions, dubcons, primal dominancy, and whatnot... I mean there's a lot going on.
I also exert myself to avoid the use of the same words or phrases. There's a lot of erotica out there where writers just get into ruts, with repeated phrases, similar flow, repetitive sentence structures. "Oh, ropes of cum stream across her face in staccato bursts again and AGAIN?" I try to avoid that type of recurring self-parroting.
I've had a writing teacher say that a writer is the first performer of any drama. That stuck with me. I try my best to emulate the characters' voices in my works and avoid my own. And that means this variety is great for the diversity of stories, but it also means that there isn't much of an "autopilot" I can lean back on.
And since I am consciously trying to avoid repeating myself or come up with new takes, that's gonna be slower than cranking out verbiage and get even a single page of a given comic done.
That goes especially harder if you consider that I've been doing these couple hundreds of comics for 10 years. Back then I came into this with a ready trove of ideas, scenarios, and phrasings in my mind; and sure, that well regenerates over time, but that initial supply is gold that can sometimes be hard to appreciate.
It's similar to how Elvis Costello put it:
"You have 20 years to write your first album and you have six months to write your second one."
All that said, there's an even more time-consuming aspect of the final stage of comic-making... Full Creative Control. That means that if I have a specific new idea for a comic in the lettering stage, there's always a possibility to include it, but that frequently means that I have to make art adjustments.
Case in point:
"Secret Tales of the X-Mansion #2".
This comic (as many others I recently released) went through some repanelling and pages redistribution that made it go from its original 8 to 12 pages.
That's accomplished by either repeating panels with slight modifications, upscaling artwork and/or relying on graphic design solutions.
That throatpie sequence above is an example of the repetition case. I extended the time of a scene by using the same artwork 3 times, but with an increased amount of semen spilling from the mouth of the character. It's not exactly masterpiece content, but it does instill a particular erotic nuance that I feel makes the story better.
I'm using that resource a handful of times in this story, not only because it's fun and sexy, but because I tend to be a bit wordy with my dialogues and the restraint of the eight pages I can afford to commission artists is frequently not enough to fit all the speech bubbles I want in each comic.
Below are some examples of the other techniques, as they were used in my previous story "That Night in '86". All the four panels in that particular page are recycled assets made from panels from other pages, using a mix of editing for cropping and mirror-swapping the panels, upscaling the art, and adding love juices over the characters' bodies. One might consider that some sort of hack, but like it or not, that's a very usual practice in mainstream comicrafting as well, due to strict deadline limitations and whatever other reasons.
So, yeah...
That's more or less why comics take so long to letter.
All that being said, Secret Tales of the X-Mansion #2: Shapeshifting Shenanigans will come out in a few days, still in February.
I truly hope you guys love reading it as much as I love making it.
Until then,
Keep on fappin' on, my smut believers!
Talk soon.
-Tracy.
Comments
Justin
Read what you said and immediately thought of 86' and saw you put it there, very true, cause it was amazing writing on that comic. Tons of effort put in those letters with sable's made-up language. And when you mention mirror-swapping, I thought of that in the pages of 86' where one of them look similar but mirrored. It happens in marvel as well for comic deadline. Loved that textless page btw
