By Zack Quaintance — This is the last full Friday of our campaign, and as such, we come to the end of our interview series featuring the team of Next Door. For today’s piece, I interviewed the project’s letterer, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, who is easily among the best letterers making comics today. Hassan is also behind some of the absolute best analysis of comics through his digital magazine PanelxPanel as well as his YouTube channel, Strip Panel Naked.

We are all so thrilled to have him on our team for this project, and I leapt at the chance to interview him here today about his approach to lettering, his work on our project, and how he’s able just on a practical level to contribute so much to the comics community.

Check out our conversation below!

Kickstarter Comics Tips - Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou Interview

ZACK QUAINTANCE: First of all, let me just say I love your work and we’re all thrilled to have you lettering Next Door! I’m curious about your process, specifically what are the first steps you take when you sit down to letter a set of pages?

HASSAN OTSMANE-ELHAOU: In a practical sense, there's loading the pages into my template, reading the script, getting a sense for the whole thing. Through that comes decisions on balloon style, line weights, font choices, etc. Partly from the script (if it's, say, a horror book, I might not want to use a jovial, bouncy font), but also trying to marry design choices to the artwork. If the artist has a thick line, I might want to replicate that in the balloon stroke. If they have a particularly graphic approach, it might inform the balloon shape, too. All that sort of thing... It's just trying to drill down on the art and decide "what it is", what qualities it has, and what can I replicate in my lettering approach so that the whole thing feels uniform and made by the same hand, as much as you can possibly do that.

As a side note, that's one of the things I am completely fascinated by with comics. Everyone delivers an unfinished version of the comic (until the letterer, that is), and each just builds on what came before it. So the artist builds on the script, the colour artist builds on the script and the lines, the letterer builds on the script, the lines *and* the colours. Were all kind of adding to each other's work, but making it feel uniform rather than layered. Ideally, by the end, you don't want to see those individual's works on the page, because you want it to just look like one person from start to finish.

ZACK: One thing about your work I’m struck by is how consistently your lettering does something new or takes an interesting risk and makes it look natural. It’s even there in the pages you’ve done for us so far, which are essentially just an ominous conversation. How conscious of being dynamic are you as you work?

HASSAN: I don't ever know I have a good answer for this question, because I'm sure it's a mix between me wanting to push things and also me trying to constantly make things engaging during the process of making it. There's many different schools of thought in lettering, but mine is that the very baseline level of what lettering is is legibility, right? The very minimum you need from lettering is to understand who is saying what, and when. It's a bit like Office Space and Chotchkie's, where there's a minimum bit of flair. In some respects, that's the adage of lettering should be invisible in full effect, you hit that baseline, make sure it works with the art, and keep it as low-profile as possible. But on the other hand, you can see the artist and the colour artist doing their thing to add to what's come before them. And in the same way, you can look at a colour artists job as being to colour the things in the panel the way they appear in real life... that's basically the equivalent of the minimum amount of flair. But most good comics colour artists don't do that-- they're making creative decisions on lighting sources, on limiting palettes, on emotional colouring choices. So I try to look at lettering in the same way. If it works or not is down to the individual reader (and I'm sure it often *doesn't*), but that's at least my process. I want to make sure there's a reason it's me working on this comic, and not someone else. And the best I can bring to that is thought and emotion into the decision making.

ZACK: It’s fair to say our book is more grounded than many of the other comics you letter. Does your approach change when lettering that kind of story versus something more fantastical, and if so, how?  

HASSAN: Yeah, in a similar vein to the first question, it's really about hitting the right tone. You can see from the sample pages of this that mostly the lettering is restrained (for me). There's some underlines which I think fit Pat's style quite nicely, but I'm holding a lot back (at least early on), to match the groundedness of the art and story at this point. It's a design and an emotional thing.

ZACK: This question is maybe more for my own benefit, but between the many many books you letterer as well as your Eisner-winning work on PanelxPanel and Strip Panel Naked...any time management wisdom you care to share? 

HASSAN: I have a calendar that blocks everything in, and I try to lay out at least a few weeks at a time. With PanelxPanel, it usually takes me something like four or five days to lay out an issue if I'm working quickly, so I know I need to schedule that in there somewhere, and I try and get print deadlines for books as early in advance as I can (though they do often change). So once I've got that all laid out, I can fit other projects in as they come. I know now roughly how long each of the things I do takes, so that's helpful, too. I guess the other part is just working a lot, but I'm trying to be better at setting in and out of work times, since we've moved back into a house and have space to have a separate "office". It feels like I've been less productive since that time, but it's probably a little kinder on myself, too.

ZACK: Finally, the question I’ve asked the rest of the team as well —- have you ever had a really bad situation with a neighbor, apartment, or living arrangement?

HASSAN: I don't think so! Which might mean that I'm the bad neighbour in everyone else's story...We've had a neighbour with a broken fence, which basically means we share the same garden as them, for about three months, and their landlord still hasn't fixed it. But that's more of a nightmare landlord situation... 

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.