• Correct. Like italics in a text page.

As a writer, how do you decide which words merit that emphasis?

• Mostly by ear.

Is it always the writer's call, or does the letterer sometimes make that call?

• The writer.

Is there an industry standard, or does it vary from writer to writer?

• Personal "style."

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After forty yar before the mast, I have a pretty good eye for how much space dialog will need.

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Now, there's something I DID change. Originally, I thought of a pseudo-James Bond title, "The Girl with the Golden Gaze." But then I got to thinking a bit more about the time period of my story.

In this era of full script, where the writer will often not get to see the art in order to check that the character is correctly 'acting' as the dialogue requires before it goes for lettering, at least half the scripts I get have very little indication as to where the emphasis should go, and it's left to the letterer (me) to make those judgements.

Obviously, the if the writer has put emphasis into the dialogue, then this is observed, but there are many writers nowadays who don't.

Obviously, the if the writer has put emphasis into the dialogue, then this is observed, but there are many writers nowadays who don't.

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One more thing the current crew thinks they're doing right, I guess, ignoring almost a hundred years of logic and tradition. I can't imagine leaving something so important to the discretion of the letterer!

Your comment about the "acting" puzzles me, tho. In this age of full script, have they also abandoned descriptions of what's supposed to be happening in the panel? Or is this a lapse back to the kind of stuff Denny O'Neil used to describe, where a writer's description of an action packed stagecoach chase is rendered by the artist as closeup on a firing six-gun?

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One of the fun elements of doing series like this, set in the Past, is coming up with the appropriate "futuristic" equipment. Computers, for example, as we imagined they would be, not as they really turned out to be.