Comicon’s Best Letterers Of 2023
by Erik Amaya
Welcome to Comicon.com’s Best of the Year Awards, gathering the best comics and comics talent of the strange year that was 2021. This year we will be awarding in the following categories: Best Original Graphic Novels, Best Comic Series, Best Single Comic Issues, Best Writers, Best Artists, Best Cover Artists, Best Colorists, Best Letterers, Best Digital/Webcomics, and Most Progressive Comics.
Contributors to Comicon’s Best of the Year Awards this year include: Rachel Bellwoar, Richard Bruton, Scott Redmond, Tito James, Tom Smithyman, and Tony Thornley.
The following are Comicon’s Best Letterers of 2023.
6. Andworld Design
An entry for a letterer that is more than just a letterer, they are a group. Led by Dereon Bennett, they are a tremendous studio that does such amazing work across so many books. At a glance, one might assume it’s just one person as there is a standard nature to the work, but little flairs of uniqueness (born of both the person behind the page and in response to what’s on the page) appear. Often, it comes in the form of a playfulness, respecting the characters and world, allowing for voices to be louder and bolder and clearer. Emotions and personalities drip from every word and letter, allowing the audience to truly hear the world being created as if we are there.
— Scott Redmond
5. Joe Caramagna
When you are creating comics with a hero as quippy as Spider-Man, you need a letterer that can keep up. Caramagna makes his letters stand out in a good way across the entire Spider-office. He matches the pacing of the characters’ dialogue. He creates interesting sound effects that are almost an art form of their own. He plays with different fonts and caption styles to make it all feel like spoken speech, rather than just printed words on the page. And best of all, it all works.
— Tony Thornley
4. Hasan Otsmane-Elhaou
Lettering is a true art form. It’s not just laying out words from a script into balloons or boxes. The really-good-to-great letterers go so much further. They sink emotion, personality, color, volume, and more into every single letter on the page. This is something Otsmane-Elhaou pulls off seemingly as easy as most of us breathe. He goes the extra mile to shift fonts, colors, sizes, placement, styling of bubbles and boxes — even sometimes eschewing those and letting the fonts float. It captures the tone of whatever the story needs, be it horror or superhero hope or anything else, and lets it echo loud and clear. It gives us the character’s voices while being a voice of its own.
— Scott Redmond
3. Joe Sabino
Sabino is one of those creators who jumps in with both feet. His work is always good, doing what a letterer should do — not stand out, blend in, and let them notice you on the second read through. In Immortal Thor alone, he tackles the complex fonts and bubbles that come with a variety of gods, aliens and heroes each with their own speech patterns and accents that he somehow nails on each and every page.
— Tony Thornley
2. Ariana Maher
Characters have things to say, thoughts to get out, and story beats to enlighten us about. They have a need to be heard and their voices should be as loud and clear as possible. Maher accomplishes that with a truly engaging flair. Whether it’s setting things in different cases (sentence or all-caps), throwing in big bold colorful bubbles or fonts, perfectly crafted caption boxes, or even well placed in-your-face SFX. No matter what, one knows that they’ll be able to fully hear characters and their world and it will be right in tune with whatever vibe the book or issue needs. It comes with a cleanness and efficiency that can’t be matched without losing a single ounce of fun. There is a reason Maher has risen the ranks so quickly as one of the best in the industry.
— Scott Redmond
1. Clayton Cowles
There’s a reason why you often seen Cowles’s name on the biggest books in the comics industry. He doesn’t just put the script on the page. He takes the story and weaves in fonts, bubble styles, captions and sound effects, and always in a way that deepens the story being told, not distracting from it. He always makes his books look clean and easy to read, while making a positive impact on the reading experience.
— Tony Thornley
