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Hexenhammer by Ohue Aguri

Benjirou of the Attic was a lovely manga. The bulk of Yamada Koto's blockletter SFX had a beautiful calligraphic quality that I wasn't able to reproduce with font faces. Sorry Yamada. Sorry readers.

So after four chapters of fence-sitting, I ditched the fonts and picked up my (tablet) pen for the finale. Well, for the most part.

Take a closer look. Not a single trace of Japanese left. That’s the work of Dessert Scans on Asano Inio’s Reiraku. They did breathtaking job replacing almost all the Japanese text scattered in Asano’s backgrounds. Their extra cover and author introductions were elegantly typeset too.

Henshin no News by Miyazaki Natsujikei SFX lettering by tim (for Illuminati-Manga)

Bad Candy You Give Me by Fuyumushi Kaiko

The Amazing Alice Wong by Tomo Sakura

I was delighted that my first project at Lovely Strange Dark was "Those Who Can't See", a grim oneshot by Nagabe. I adore the gloomy aesthetic of his darker work. The oneshot was finished and going through QC when another group (Baby One More Time) beat us to the punch. All good. We released ours the following week anyway.

It was cool seeing two different approaches applied to the same oneshot. While BOMT's version left most of the original SFX intact, a few of their pages were peppered with striking handwritten pieces. Unfortunately, their release was also missing a page or two. I really would've liked to see the lettering for those.

Lately I've been practicing handwriting SFX. Browsing font galleries is still fun, but I won't miss the trouble of hunting for fonts to match the original art. And goodbye to wrestling with paths in Photoshop.

There's a weird feeling that comes from seeing my own handwriting on manga. Kinda like guiltily drawing ugly graffiti. I'd forgotten my earliest tries until I revisited my previous work on 7SEEDS. That was a trip.

SFX lettering is cool. Full stop. It's a massive undertaking for the scanlators who choose to do full redraw SFX. And I love every single one of them for it. Thanks for the years of immersive reading experiences.

When I made my first dip into scanlation with Tamura Yumi's 7SEEDS, I gave myself no other option. My first few passable attempts took forever, and each just short of a small travesty. Looking back at it now, I'm a little embarrassed but glad to have had free rein to experiment. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.