Remember how Al Milgrom allegedly got treated after his little "anti-Bob Harras" lettering scandal . Which was caught, stopped and fixed and then some staffer sent the wrong copies off to get coloured. At which point it wasn't even Milgrom's fault that the stuff got to press.

But this ....

This stuff has gone through every part of the production without anybody saying "maybe we shouldn't letter the actual words" or "You don't use that kind of language in a DC comic".  This mess ultimately starts with Miller.

How much are you willing to bet that Miller will not be "Milgromed" over this. They'll probably blame it on some intern in the production department instead.

Thing is, since the lettering was (most likely) done in Illustrator, it would
have been a step of maybe another 5 seconds to make the offending
words into paths, and then merge them with the block - meaning that
you'd get the desired effect of little aspects of the lettering sticking out,
but no danger whatsoever of the block moving or a misprint like this
occurring.

****

that was something else I wondered.  Is there some technical reason a different kind of ink was used to make the bars over the offending words?

I wonder why the real cusswords were printed at all if there was going to be black bars over all the words in question? And what was the problem of using the traditional "cuss symbols," with exclamation points, etc., unless that was deemed to "comic booky"? And why was it really even necessary to use real cussing, or even suggested cussing, at all? Does everything Miller touches have to be so edgy?

Frankly, I think the black bars would totally distract from the story. To me, it's not just a bad editorial decision, it's a bad creative decision.

And like with many other people,  Frank Miller continues to disappoint me. I loved his classic work on "Daredevil," "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," and his own creator-owned works, but his superhero comics work from 1990s onward has been horrible and, to me, it seems to hold disdain towards superhero fans.

Frankly, I no more give Miller a pass than I would the likes of Warren Ellis, and other writers who apparently hate the superhero genre. If he doesn't like the genre, stop working in it.

And what has Hollywood done to Miller? Based on the marketing so far, "The Spirit" is not just a slap in the face to fans of the character, but to Wil Eisner, himself! That takes stones from "one of our own."

When lettering, the balloons should be rich black - made up from the four individual CMYK plates. The actual lettering text, however, should be just the K (black) plate, 100% K. This way, if there's any plate shift on the presses, the text will still be crisp, sharp, and easy to read. Looks like what's happened here is the black blocks have been made from all four CMYK plates, the rich black. Because of that, it's been easy to still read the offending words.

If the letterer added the blocks himself, I'm surprised because any letterer worth their salt should know the difference between the two blacks, and thus be aware of the possible problems when the pages are printed. Maybe the blocks were added by production, after the lettering had been signed off, who knows. But you know, both the letterer AND the production guys should know what they're doing, and obviously someone there doesn't, hence the goof.

Still, didn't someone once say that there's no such thing as bad publicity? It's a little bit like when DC canned "The Boys" - all of a sudden, people were snapping up every available copy from the shelves. It wouldn't surprise me if the corrected versions of ASBAR #10 sell more than the previous issue.