By Ritesh Babu — Aditya Bidikar is perhaps one of the most prolific letterers in the American Direct Market world of comics. And certainly among the most sought-after at the moment, as the list of titles he’s been involved with recently illustrates. In 2020, he had a landmark year, working on some of the biggest, most successful, and creatively-rich texts that we saw released. From the likes of Hellblazer and Blue In Green to Barbalien, Bidikar has a body of work that is both as interesting as it is varied.

And today, I’d like to take some time to unpack some of those works. Ones that I happen to be quite enamored with.

Certainly, the letterer will be most known for his work on the juggernaut indie book that is The Department Of Truth, and we’ll get to it. But as we do, we’ll go through some relatively lesser-known texts as well. Works that feel just as telling and informative, and shed light on his approach to storytelling.

I - Blood Moon: What Cost, Revenge?

A free-to-read webcomic beginning in 2019, Blood Moon is an ongoing project by the creative team of P. M Buchan, John Pearson and Aditya Bidikar, with editor Hannah Means-Shannon.

Set on the eve of the Brexit Referendum, it’s a British folk-horror story about a tragedy.

We follow a family that’s only just moved to Cornwall, who can only afford to live in a small tent by the road. The Fitzwilliams are a small unit, led by Owen and Maura, the two parents, and their two children, Anna and Harley. They’re outsiders to Cornwall, and they may not have much, but they make do. All they want is to make a life here, one that is hopefully better than the one they had prior.

But it all goes wrong. A crew of rich kids, drunk-driving, kill Harley Fitzwilliam and put Maura in a coma. The tragedy is horrific, as this entire familial unit is destroyed in a moment. But more horrific is the fact that those same kids bail from the crime scene, not stopping. With strong ties to the local rightwinger MP, who peddles predictable Brexit rhetoric, the kids escape all consequences.

After all, the Fitzwilliams are not ‘Cornish,’ they’re not ‘local.’ They’re ‘outsiders.’ Thus not a word is spoken to help Owen, who sits with a daughter he cannot control, his partner lost, and his son doomed. No evidence turns up, and the whole thing’s a dead-end.

That’s when, through desperation, witches, blood-bargains, devils, and other manner of horrific oddities get involved to fuel this tale of bloody revenge.

That’s the essence of the work, which I think is important to note, as is the style in which it is conveyed, as can be seen in the page above, showcasing John Pearson’s work. Both of these are key to understanding the work that Bidikar is actually doing, and what that means and does for the final work that we see.

Consider this page:

It’s not one that is aiming to be ‘cohesive’ in the traditional sense, as much as it is a fractal realm of contrasts. It’s blacks and whites, it’s faded photo-figures in the background, loose sketches, it’s various disparate layers at various parts of the page. It’s colors that aren’t attempting to naturally ‘mingle’ as much as highlight the presence of the other.

It’s not going for ‘clean’ as much as it is a rough, jagged reality that’s at odds with itself. It’s a reality that’s pliable. That’s on the edge. It’s not all solid, but neither has it been crushed to pulp to be all fluid. It’s in this middle state, where detail persists in some places, while in others it is absent entirely. Some things are insinuated and suggested than detailed, others are brought to life.

And that makes sense to me, especially in the context of its story. It’s set on the eve of Brexit. It’s reality as messy, uneven, kind of all over the place. It’s not meant to be taken in as one complete hologram, as much as disparate things that just don’t seem to fit, which seem to resist any synthesis.

Take a look at another page, which is more or less this comic’s version of a page sticking to the nine-panel grid form, just with the upper tier unified:

Notice how this isn’t all ordered and clean. The panels aren’t bordered and delineated. They’re not consistent, they don’t try to fit to a set size or shape, just the loose notion of a panel. Moments almost seem to bleed into one another, and rather than clean pencil outlines, you have broad brushstrokes painting this reality.

And the canvas it's being painted on is almost this aging paper, this liquid-stained paper, wherein parts are whited out, elements are rough and incomplete, it feels like a reality on the verge of a glitch. 

So consider how one might letter this, how this could be lettered?

The traditional ‘solid’ approach to lettering this, that which has ‘weight’ feels wrong for this. You cannot do any conventional approach here that would serve Pearson’s style fairly here. This demands ‘lighter’ lettering, which actually reflects the nature of what we’re seeing, what we’re being asked to experience alongside the characters. And to that end, Bidikar comes up with a style that is effectively the prototype for what he would go onto use and refine further in the likes of The Department Of Truth.

It’s a style that eschews the typical oval balloons, and even the scalloping balloons that present a variation on said oval. You don’t get smooth edges that blend and curve. You get jagged ones that strike out, ones that feel uncertain and ‘hard’ rather than ‘soft’. They have no borders, not really. The only thing resembling a border sits atop the entire balloon, like a poorly fit-frame. It’s a border that cannot contain that which it is supposed to. It’s a boundary that doesn’t even truly fit that which it might be intended to.

It’s not quite right. But then, nothing is, is it? It’s not ‘comfortable’. There’s an air of unease and uncertainty suggested by it. This is only aided by the text that sits within said balloons, feeling like it’s constantly at a tilt, skewing one way or another. It’s slim lines, written in a manner that evokes a sense of diaristic quality. It feels ‘small’ and personal, but also like the scribbles from a sharp quill, which at any moment could get sharper still.

It all grants the work a personality it would otherwise not have. It’s not ‘invisible’ lettering. You notice it at every moment, at every turn, and the fact that you do makes the reading all the more chilling, all the more foreboding. The letters, in calling attention to themselves, become tools to build across the page, across beats. The words are weaponized on a visual level to have impact on a consistent basis, as the visuals actually reflect the sense that you don’t know what to expect.

The balloons hang like ghostly warnings embedded at the heart of this horror narrative, as their sharp tails feel like razors meant to slice. The air of unease that builds across this book only does in the manner it does because Bidikar’s lettering fundamentally understands the work and its nature. The placements across the pages not only carefully guide your eye to the essential moments in the right order, they also help juxtapose vital elements and punctuate points to carry the storytelling. They’re the razor sharp guide to the heart of the narrative.

Often, it is common among a great many to discuss comics by dividing them into the dull binary of ‘Story’ and ‘Art.’ And ‘story,’ in that context, is a more weighty way of saying ‘Writing’. But nowhere amidst those discussions does it occur to many the plethora of problems therein. The idea implicit here that ‘Writing’ is ‘Story,’ while everything else, the ‘Art’ as it were, isn’t. The very notion that these things are divisible at all, when the entire form of comics is built on the marriage of imagery and text. The ‘story,’ as it were, is the hologram, the symbiotic output of the collective. It is not the words in the script a writer puts down. It is not just the pencils the artist does. It is not merely the colors the colorist employs. It is not just the lettering a letterer does. It is the totality of all of that. It is that as one unit. ‘Story’ is the sum of all parts, at once. It’s the unified whole of disparate voices, inseparable from all others.

It’s why I cannot discuss the lettering without discussing what the work is. For it is easy to reductively classify the likes of colors, pencils, and letters into ‘Art,’ or to shrug them away into the corner of ‘Form,’ while Writing is ‘Story,’ placing the ur-importance on said supposed story but not how it was told. It is easy to talk about lettering or these other elements of the form as isolated ‘Craft,’ divorced from their contexts, as dull exercises of an artisan’s tools. And many do it enough that widely speaking, there is a disinterest in how this craft, the formalism, actually matters deeply to the contents of a work. It’s why Bidikar’s lettering here must be placed within the context of the work it’s part of, for what Bidikar is doing isn’t just leading the reader’s eye, it isn’t just getting the text down. 

It’s surgery. It’s stitching various disparate elements of a body back together, to bring the body to life. It’s a vital operation, without which what you have is a dead body with no life. A comic is saved or slain on its lettering. Lettering is seeing, lettering is understanding. Lettering is knowing the shape of a thing, the spirit of it, understanding how its heart must beat, and then performing the job that will make it so. It’s storytelling to stitch together all the various parts, to actually make the final comic. It’s the glue that holds it together, and it’s the pulse that gives it life. It’s what makes a comic sing.

And for a comic set on the eve of Brexit? One which is, quite literally, about a reality that feels like it’s on the verge of collapse? Bidikar’s specific approach to the book works. It fits a narrative wherein the what was is lost, and it didn’t just vanish into thin air. It was taken. It was taken by careless, privileged monsters who couldn’t give a toss about who got hurt in their delusional power trips. It was taken by those that’ll be just fine and just comfy, whose futures are a-okay. But the people who lost suffered, who hoped for a better future? They lost their chance at that, as they had everything taken from them. And they get no voice. They get no justice, for they are not ‘from here’. They are ‘outsiders’, and they are struggling working class people, who get nothing. It’s about the shattering of a family, which, when you look at it, is basically a mechanism to reflect the larger shattering that Brexit represented. Something was irreparably broken here, and there is no going back. 

The death of a child represents just that. The loss of a future. The loss of potential. The loss of all that could have been. And all for what exactly? For nothing. For absolutely nothing. That which was so important was taken for no real reason at all.

For a comic about the anger of that, the horror of that, the fury of that, set in this pliable reality about to burst on the seams? A reality that is all jagged edges, horror and rage that cannot be contained and sealed into a neat box or balloon? Yeah, it works. It feels true. It’s pure storytelling. The text-as-graphic storytelling is a vital part of what makes comics function, and that’s what Bidikar does here. He captures the truth of the comic in the most visceral, potent way for the reader, that not only reflects that truth, but enhances and adds to it.

II - Coffin Bound: Happy Ashes

Kicking off in 2019, Coffin Bound is an ongoing project by Dan Watters, Dani, Brad Simpson and Aditya Bidikar, published at Image Comics.

A fairly dour text, Coffin Bound is...precisely what the title promises. It’s about death. It’s about the dying. It’s about those bound to death, and about those who shall pass on. Each arc of the book is about someone who is confronting their demise. But all that of that is done not through hard-line realism, but through an elevated and absurd reality that feels like a theater production. It’s strange, no one really speaks in a ‘realistic’ manner, and it’s closer to the aesthetics of a Gerard Way music video than it is to reality.

The world the comic inhabits is one where Death is a literal monster that is coming for you, hunting you down. And it’s one where one’s doom is symbolized by a patient Vulture-man in a coat, with a bird-cage on his head. He walks around with you, as you call up your pals who are now just Brains, quite literally.

There’s an absurdist horror to the text, and at its core, it’s rooted in questions of death and existence. It asks if we’re all more than the sum of our parts, if our presence really means anything, and if we’ve harmed more than helped. It asks us to take stock of our own legacy and what it really means to be here, to be breathing, living, standing and engaging with our fellow people in this moment. That it opens on Kafka-quotes shouldn’t be surprising.

It’s a text wherein the lead, Izzy, is quite ready for death, but most importantly, wants to close up her matters on this earth. Her singular goal remains, to ‘erase’ herself, her very presence. She wants to be gone, and when those that remembered here are, too, no one will even know she existed. It’s a book about erasing one-self.

Dani’s artwork on the book is very much going for a minimalist approach, to capture not just the absurdist reality, but the nature of the story. Smoke isn’t detailed smoke, but a jagged, mad frenzy of sharp lines. The negative space is utilized to convey significant meaning rather than through standard detail. The nothingness, the absence, and simple strokes suggest larger things, as reality is broken down to its barest essence, stripped down to its fundamental components.

There’s a poetic quality to it all. Everything is, yet isn’t. Everything is on the verge of vanishing out of existence. What is there feels like that which you could reach out to touch, only to find it is now gone.

Now, observe Bidikar’s lettering across these pages. How does his work reflect the work?

Immediately, you’ll notice unbordered balloons, just balloons of white sitting on top of the art. Until you realize...not quite. They’re bordered, but only just a tiny bit. It’s like whatever complete border existed has now been erased. Like it’s been eliminated. It’s like a breakdown, graphically, of what is there.

Now, look closer at the tails of said balloons.They’re not the standard tails with depth or ‘weight’. They’re just a thin white-line and a black-line strung together to make a thin link. Everything is simplified, reduced, broken down, and stripped away here. Everything has been brought down to its barest essence, its simplest form. It’s just black and white, with no room for anything else. This is a reality not of detail or ‘realism’ but almost archetypal nature, in that sense.

Notice how The Vulture, the figure symbolizing death and doom, has his letterforms done. His letters are the jagged, uncertain boxes, the font sharp as knives, as though it were carved with one. But unlike the previous jagged panels we’ve seen in Blood Moon, these are ones where there is no ‘completeness’. The boxes in Blood Moon don’t fit with another, but they are complete. They show a clash of realities, a mismatch.

What these jagged balloons show instead is a rough reality that’s clinging on, like patchwork. The incomplete lines, which feel drawn on too long, the shakiness they imply and the uneven nature of it all, that is in-line with the nature of the work. The Vulture being here is not quite right. It feels haunting. It feels ghastly, like a scratching noise, as though nails were being dragged across the board, that rings within your head. It reads like the horrific noise that cannot go on. It is only for a time. It’s a voice that is set to end, and will come to a close, when Izzy dies, as she must at the end of the volume.

But beyond that, notice how, while all these choices could very easily pull you, the reader, out they actually do fit with the page and the rest of the ‘standard’ lettering. The Vulture’s lettering is meant to stand-out, to pull you beyond the ‘typical’ of this world a bit more, but just enough, not much more than desired, to the point that it breaks. This requires a careful, delicate balance that calls attention itself but never too much. That’s the magic of Bidikar’s lettering work here for me. That it works. That it rides that balance and pulls it off.

It nails the more subdued, stripped down approach, the sort of silent, meditative aspects of the text, which are about decay and erosion. It’s about things coming apart, falling to time, it’s about that lovely new car you see turning to a rust-bucket, as that is inevitable. It’s an acceptance of death on the material level. And it’s matter-of-fact about it, for Izzy’s balloons do not express shock or surprise at the presence of The Vulture. There is no buzzing, loud Workman-esque scream of horror. It’s the calm lettering that plays it like it’s just another tiresome Monday for Izzy.

But while Bidikar’s approach here does all this, it does the opposite, too. Coffin Bound is a work loaded on grindhouse horror aesthetics. There is a ‘loudness’ to it, underneath the more silent demeanor, which really pops out when the Eartheater character, who is Death, arrives.

This same ‘loudness’ again runs in sharp contrast to the rest of the text, as you can observe Eartheather’s got a clear title on top of each caption pertaining to it. And the title isn’t written in slim, reduced text, but big, bold text with weight. It even teems with color and is ostentatious, coming with an exclamation point to really hit home the message.

This is the opposition, this is that which is all the things in here are not. This is Death. This is bigger, bolder, heavier than all others. This walks with a weight and presence, it is held with a power that is unlike anything else, as is reflected in the very form of the comic, visually. The forcefulness that comes through here is part of the story.

And that counter-approach, that contrast to the rest of the material, it never ends up breaking the comic. It, again, works just enough, as it never goes overboard, to get the point across.

Coffin Bound wouldn’t really work as well without this delicate approach to its lettering, which is so committed to capturing its spirit. It’s idiosyncratic and true to the essence of the work, and tells you everything you need to know about it in one glance.

It’s why, in the end, when everything clashes, when everything has been stripped away and bare, when inevitability has caught up, when Death has finally come, and the end is here, you buy it. You believe it.

III - The Department of Truth: The End of the World

The Department Of Truth, published by Image Comics, is an ongoing project from 2020 by the creative team of James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, with designer Dylan Todd, and editor Steve Foxe.

It is a text of conspiracies. It’s a book about the conspiracies that have haunted us all, and ones that will forever continue to haunt us. It’s a book about our past, and more vitally, it’s about the present. Above all, it’s a book deeply, fundamentally about America, and a text rooted in the 2016 - 2021 era of American Politics, wherein Trump held office.

It’s a guttural scream of a book about Trump’s America, and all the things that preceded it, that came before it, to make way for it in the first place. However, at its core, it’s a book about narratives, the nature of narratives, and why we buy into or believe in them at all, and how they can shape us. It’s about the power they hold over culture and a people, their reality aside. It’s about the harm that is possible because of them, because, as we all ought to know by now, something needn’t be real to damage us all. People need only believe in it.

It’s a text about consensus reality and how it affects and shapes things, literalizing that which terrifies us, which is what horror as a genre is so effective at. And so we’re immersed into this world wherein the collective whims of people, enough people, can alter reality.

And at its heart is our protagonist Cole Turner, a man who has experienced such reality-altering events. He’s a man caught in a world he’s only begun to even comprehend, a pawn of much larger forces whom he cannot truly grasp the full nature of. Given its contents, it’s a book about perception of reality, meaning it’s subjective on a very visceral level. And that’s what Martin Simmonds’ artwork captures here, channeling the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz. Combining photo-reference and a painterly style, screaming ‘Vertigo’, the work feels very much the spiritual successor to Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light: The Shadowplay.

The thing about being part of that tradition, however, means you need lettering that is really willing to go bold. What you have here is a text about the very subjective experience that Cole Turner is having, wherein reality is seen through his eyes, felt through his senses, and his experience is meant to be our experience. How he’s taking this in is how we’re taking it in, that’s the reality that Simmonds’ artwork paints. It’s all framed through Cole’s POV, because by the very nature of such stories, they demand a subjective perspective to grant them meaning. To have characters who’re interpreting, uncertain and are like us, lacking in answers.

So when Bidikar approaches the work, with Simmonds’ art, which is almost this bridge to subjective realities, one that feels translucent, it can be a real challenge. Simmonds’ art flows wide, it goes big. It’s like reality upon foggy glass, painted over, set to vanish at any moment. And that sort of light, flowy work, which can take up entire spreads and splashes with one singular image eating away at all space, it can be something in which the words almost sink. Either that, or the text destroys that flowy, reality-as-foggy-glass quality of the work. It’s a tricky balance.

Which is why the style that Bidikar used in Blood Moon is effectively resurrected. Or more accurately- a version of it is to be refined and reworked. And that makes sense. Both on a visual level, given there is a touch of commonality in the nature of the art we’re discussing here (Pearson and Simmonds have worked together before), but also on a thematic level. This is a story set firmly in Trump’s America, about a gay man trying to process the absurd reality he seems to be plunged in, and you can absolutely draw a line of connection from a narrative framed around Brexit to one another Trump’s America. And so taking from that style? That makes sense in my eyes, while also effectively building on and refining on past work. It’s lettering and aesthetic as means to further explore ideas which share a commonality- namely realities shaped by right-wing cruelty and madness.

The differences, however, are telling.

Bidikar ditches the thin font that’s tilting and in a different direction than ‘diaristic.’ Instead, the words here are bolder, and have much greater ‘weight’. They hang with a greater heaviness, and the word balloons become akin to anchors on the loose artwork. They ‘ground’ the subjectivity with meaning. The jagged balloons, with a border that just doesn’t fit, are back, but the borders seem to hang looser around the balloons, certain, but also fluid enough, reflecting the spirit of the book. And this time, that approach has a different effect from Blood Moon.

The thicker, more confident nature of the text with the ill-fitting borders almost makes the balloons seem like they’re cut-outs. Like, they’re clippings and things cut with a scissor, about to be placed and pinned on a giant conspiracy board. And is that not the book in a nutshell? But also, it’s informative to see how Bidikar approaches the book when it shifts parameters. Does his lettering change? Does it stay the same? And what does that tell us about the work itself?

The above is a page from #6 drawn by the incredible Elsa Charretier. It’s the ‘break’ issue from the ‘main’ narrative and arc of the book, with regular artist Martin Simmonds taking a break. And this being a planned fill-in issue, fundamentally built into the structure of the book, accounts for that. It’s an issue that departs from our Cole Turner’s perspective, his subjective view of the world and his reality. We pull back from all that and cut to a flashback, as seen above.

Notice how it’s lettered, and ask yourself ‘Why wasn’t the established lettering style for this one?’

Instead, this is a much more ‘standard’ lettering approach to the book, and it’s worth pondering. The answer requires less discerning intent, as that is not at all the goal or the interest of this writing, and more interpretation, as ever. It’s not so much trying to precisely guess the thoughts of the artist, as much as it is ‘This is how it comes across to me, this is how I read it’, because it is ultimately what the work is doing for me.

Fundamentally, this is an issue drawn by a different artist, telling a different story, in a different style. Charretier’s work is decidedly NOT Simmonds, and the book isn’t trying to mold it to fit or be akin to Simmonds’ either. So the lettering approaching her work as though it were Simmonds’ and lettering it just the same, given the gulf between the two’s approaches, feels like a misstep. It just wouldn’t look as good as it does on Simmonds’ work, and is not the best fit. Charretier’s work isn’t as flowy and nor is it the ‘reality-as-foggy-glass’ approach of Simmonds. It’s much more solid, much more actively tangible. It’s more ‘real’ and discernible. Its various elements can be parsed more easily and studied. It’s not translucent reality. So the pretense that it even is through lettering designed to reflect that? A mistake.

And once you get that, once you understand that in a comic that is so built around form serving function, another thing becomes evident- This is a much more ‘objective’ view of reality. This isn’t Cole Turner’s perspective, full of uncertainty. This is much more certain. It’s divorced from the head-space and experience of call. And more vitally, what that also tells us is- if the primary Department Of Truth story is rooted in the ‘now’, the immediacy, Cole in the moment, then this is the opposite. It’s a flashback. It’s not ‘Things As They Are Happening/Experienced’, it is Things As They Already Happened. There’s a documented quality to them, a clarity that can only arrived at from a retrospective, the power of hindsight and reflection. And thus the much more messy subjectivity is stripped away.

It’s capturing a fundamentally different thing, and its goals are much different. However, that documentative quality isn’t to say it’s neutered of personality either. Far from it:

Bidikar opts for balloons which are ‘fluid’ albeit in a different way, which bend and curve as per the moment, to reflect back and forths on reality feel charged, like the conversational equivalent of a sword-duel. And that less glaring nature, with this approach just tweaking the typical approach to comics lettering, fits the narrative and story, wherein two people are masking their true natures, sitting on secrets, and circling one another, measuring each other. They’re playing a game of sorts, and that’s what this approach serves, while being a different beast than the usual. The ‘softness’ here also fits Charretier's style much better and carries a loose flow that clicks, as  the balloon tails bend and twirl in this conversational duel.

Lettering is a delicate art, one of immense complexity and thought. It’s the art of visual storytelling at its purest, for it’s marrying the text and the imagery together, to the point that imagery is text and text is imagery. It’s what binds everything, without which everything would collapse. It’s the first thing you notice and the first thing you take for granted as you read, for it guides you so gently, when done right, immersing you in its world and vision, that it’s downright magical. 

And among the plethora of incredible contemporary letterers out there, Bidikar’s work stands out to me as being among the best, and deeply considered. His style is that of chameleon-like adaptation to the nature of a work, matched with a precision that helps the text be incredibly legible, while making formally striking choices. The lettering doesn’t get in the way of the work, but fits with the work. It’s not invisible, for no good lettering is ever invisible, but chameleon-esque adaptation to the environment and context. That’s what good lettering does. It fits with what it’s surrounded by. 

Bidikar’s work doesn’t distract, but enhances and adds, which is essentially why you’ve been seeing his name on so many notable, key books over the last year or so. And I suspect it’s why you’ll be seeing his name on a great many more for years to come.

Ritesh Babu is a comics critic whose work has appeared in PanelxPanel, ComicBookHerald, ComicsXF and more. He can be found on Twitter at @riteshwriter.

Love of Letters is a year-long occasional series celebrating all things comics lettering. Read the previous entry in the series, The Aditya Bidikar interview, now!