Love of Letters: The Aditya Bidikar Interview
By Ariel Baska — Today marks the launch of Love of Letters, a new series here at Comics Bookcase that will feature interviews, articles, and reading lists all about — as the name implies — lettering and letterers. With a pair of great pieces to launch things this month, Love of Letters will continue throughout the year. With us today to discuss the magic and work of comics creation is Master of Letters Aditya Bidikar, who generously came into my “virtual” living room to talk to me in the middle of the pandemic, all the way from India.
The Aditya Bidikar Interview
ARIEL BASKA: Before we start, I wanted to quickly acknowledge that you were kind of the MVP of the Best Comics of 2020 - Comics Bookcase Staff Picks list!
ADITYA BIDIKAR: Yeah, I think I'm on five of them or something.
The cover of Blue in Green by Ram V, Anand RK, Aditya Bidikar, and Tom Muller, with John J Pearson.
ARIEL: I first noticed your work on Little Bird, and how well it integrated with all of the aspects of the book, And then all of a sudden there was an explosion of comics I absolutely loved this year, all of which you were involved in. Thank you for these works, like Department of Truth. But this was also the year of Blue in Green.
ADITYA: I haven't stopped thinking about that book since we got done because I'm so proud of that book.
ARIEL: I honestly have to say that these are the two books that literally everybody on my gift buying list got this year, everybody got either A Map to the Sun or Blue in Green. But you're doing such different work on all of these. And it's amazing to me how you are expressing so much within the worlds that you're creating in terms of the text.
ADITYA: Now that's cool, because that's actually what I've been trying to do. Like, when I started freelancing, that was the thing that I decided — that I am going to treat every book like its own thing. And whatever it takes to express what I feel is best about that book is what I'm going to do. And that's actually kind of the reason that I kind of wrecked myself this year, because I was pushing myself so hard to come up with something new on everything. And there's only so much time in the world. So yeah, this year, I'm cutting down. And I'm going to do something like 10 fewer books at least. So let's hope that works out. But that's my intention that I think every book has a particular spirit, and I want to try and express that as well as possible.
ARIEL: And you capture it so beautifully, elevating the artists and the writers to a certain extent with everything that you do in the lettering as well.
ADITYA: Thank you. That's something I tried to do. I mean, I never believe that I'm doing that. Like even sometimes I'll look at something years later. And I kind of realize oh, I was doing quite well on that one. But generally speaking, I'm just trying to kind of keep up with all the talented people that I work with. I just don't want them to feel that I've let them down. I'm primarily a fan of comics, like I really love comics. And a lot of the people that I work with now are people whose comics I've read when I was getting into comics for the first time. So these are not people I wish to let down.
ARIEL: I wanted to ask you how you describe your role in comics creation to others who may not necessarily know what the letterer does, per se. I mean, I know you've recorded podcasts on this conversation on Strip Panel Naked with Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou with these lovely, free flowing conversations, but if you have to sum it up, what's the really quick answer if someone says “what do you do for a living”?
Aditya Bidikar.
ADITYA: It kind of depends on the person in front of me. Half of the time, I'll say that I basically design for comics. Just to keep it simple, because that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm taking the script, and I'm designing it so that it goes well with the page, right? That's one way of describing it. The other way of describing it is either I say I'm like the rhythm section in the band. Or I say I'm like the sound designer in film. So that depends on who I'm talking to, if they have a film background, I just go for the film metaphor. But I see my work as design work. It's a specific kind of design work that doesn't require proper graphic design skills.
ARIEL: And then, of course, there’s the old adage that letters should be invisible. Where do you come down on that? I mean, I've never felt that your letters are particularly invisible, because they seem so integral to everything, right?
ADITYA: See, I definitely don't agree with that adage. And I've had this argument with people where they kind of start defining invisible in different ways. And they kind of come down on like, oh, it should be organic. And I don't disagree with that. I definitely think lettering should be organic. But I don't think it should be invisible. It's sort of like, I don't know, if you've read House of Leaves. It's a book that’s told in multiple formats. And each format has a different graphic design. And it calls out to you, like the footnotes, the font changes from serif to sans serif at some point in time. And those are all supposed to tell you something. When that's happening, the text can't really be invisible.
A page from Little Bird.
On the other hand, if you're reading a regular novel, you want the letters of the text to be invisible, because you just want to get the contents. Both are legitimate ways of doing things. And it depends on what the book means. And so on something like, if I see a regular Batman, Superman, Captain Marvel kind of book, I don't think I would necessarily want the lettering to stand out beyond the shouty bits and the sound effects and stuff like that. But on the other hand, I'm doing a book called Future State: Dark Detective. And on that, there is an entire tone to the whole thing, a futuristic tone. I needed to match that. So I couldn't just hold back and say, Okay, I'm going to let the lettering be invisible. But there were places where I needed to kind of put the lettering in the forefront, so that the reader gets something out of that, like there's a specific — not a message exactly, but a specific tone and expression that I'm going to try to convey. And for that sometimes, invisible lettering is not good enough.
On something like Little Bird, I don't think the lettering is particularly invisible on that now, because you have this hyper-detailed artwork from Ian [Bertram] and Matt [Hollingsworth]. And you have this action that's like 110 percent. It goes up to 11, like Spinal Tap says. So the lettering also needs to go up to 11 for that. So I don't think invisible is a good measure for lettering, specifically. I'm sure it's a good pretty good measure for design or some other stuff. But I don't think “lettering should be invisible” is something that I particularly agree with. And thankfully, Todd Klein comes down on the same side as me. So I'm in good company.
ARIEL: Obviously.
ADITYA: If you look at his work in Sandman Overture or Doom Patrol — this is not invisible work. No. It stands out.
ARIEL: And it's wonderful because it's almost like he set the standard for what we think of lettering. For a lot of people, Sandman is sort of the gateway drug.
ADITYA: As a letterer myself, I would kind of push the needle back to Gaspar Saladino, who in something like Arkham Asylum or stuff that he did before that. Gaspar was already somebody who wasn't afraid to stand out once in a while. And I think between Gaspar and Todd Klein, we've got this. Even Thomas Orzechowski who even though his lettering for X-Men was always very neat and precise, he would also kind of push boundaries in terms of organic sound effects and stuff like that. You've got all these people, even [John] Workman's lettering is almost never invisible, it really stands out because it's an element on the page. It's like, you know, [Walt] Simonson’s Thor that's designed around the lettering, especially what Simonson is doing with Ragnarok right now. Workman actually letters the page before Simonson draws anything. That's how much say he gets on how the other book flows.
ARIEL: And is that how much say you get when you're working with Ram V. and others?
A page from Blue in Green.
ADITYA: With Ram, I would say so. I don't know if I'll always want that, because I also trust that people like him, they know what they're doing. Ram and I talk almost every day, and he sends me pages of whatever he's doing whether or not I'm lettering it. So if I'm lettering something, and I notice something, and I want us to push in a particular direction, I have the option to kind of call it out early on.
Also, because he sends me those pages, kind of throughout the process, I have months to cogitate and come up with what I want to do, because it's not like I'm getting the book just when it's finished. On the other hand, there are other books — which I think I've done really well with — I received on the day of lettering, and I'm just fine. You kind of work with what's what's in front of you.
Different people have different collaboration processes that work for them. So there are people who like having a central editor and everything goes through them, while with somebody like Ram, he wants the whole team to kind of jam throughout. They're both good ways of working. With Ram’s books, it kind of ends up being a little more personal because I've seen the book grow over months and years sometimes. I think the book we're doing that's coming up in April, I think that's a book that we've been talking about for four years, probably. So it's got a long gestation period. And it's been in my mind for that long as well. So I obviously have a personal connection.
ARIEL: And I also have to say, though, that you work with some really amazing creators across the board. I went back and I found The Sadhu and Mistry, P.I. that you worked on for Graphic India on Comixology, and I was pretty impressed with the work. But I couldn’t find the works that you had written for Graphic India.
A page from Department of Truth by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, and Aditya Bidikar.
ADITYA: I didn’t actually write anything for Graphic India. I was an editor and a letterer. I wrote one six page short, I think, Chakra. It was a little bit of fun. I hadn't written anything in something like two or three years. And I asked my editor if I could write something and he was like, yeah, sure, like pitch me something. And I wrote that. Yeah, I haven't read that in years. I don't remember if it stands up.
But you know, Mistry, P.I. was one of my old favorites. It was written by my editor, Ashwin Pandey, and it was drawn by the amazing Arjuna Cassini, and so I got to kind of take in this European flavor. It was one of my early experiments with these brushy balloons and weird styles and stuff. And I really enjoyed doing that.
I worked for Graphic India for three years, and it was this nice place to be on a salary because then I could mess up the lettering on a particular book, just to try something out. My CEO could just tell me, just redo that, because I wasn't charging him freelance rates. I could tell him like, you know, I want to try something. If I don't like it, we change everything. We got to do that a couple of times where I kind of had to be like, relax or something. But it was perfectly okay, because I was on a salary. And I got to try new stuff out that might not have worked the first time out. But it taught me stuff about lettering.
ARIEL: Wow.
Mistry, P.I., from Graphic India.
ADITYA: Yeah, and I also edited a few books there. I got to learn how complex the work of editing is. I just thought I was going to be editing the script. But then I realized that no, you have all those project timelines, and then you edit the artwork after it comes in — the thumbnails, the artwork, the colors — and you have to have intelligent feedback about that. You need to know a little bit about everything. That was something I learned at Graphic India. I think that's stood me in good stead, because even now as the letterer, I know a little bit about everything. I can give feedback about almost every part of the process, and we can sort of make the lettering work a little better. Based on that, I'm very hands on. I'm not one of those letterers where you can send me the book, I letter it, and it goes back. I'll send you a draft and I'll write a 1000-word email explaining what I've done, and what options we have, and what else we can do.
ARIEL: And I would imagine that that creative process looks very, very different from a lot of other people's. So it feeds into certain creators' mindsets.
ADITYA: I've been lucky that most people have been pretty tolerant about it, or appreciative of it. Ram particularly or, you know, Dan Watters, or Darcy [Van Poelgeest] — having these people, like, they'll read the email, and they'll be like, let's get on a call. And let's talk about this. Let's try and see what else we could do with this. So they look at it like it's a band, and we're jamming. So let's try a few things, and then we can decide. I like people who understand that we can go down the wrong path for a little bit and then come back. It's okay to try something new. Even if it's not necessarily gonna work out.
ARIEL: And having that freedom has to make a huge difference, I would think. I wonder about the constraints of time. How many elements of your work are hand lettered?
ADITYA: Well, it depends on the book. With Blue In Green, and Grafity's Wall, everything was hand lettered. With most of my digital books, the sound effects are hand lettered. Then there are some books where everything except the dialogue is hand lettered.
A two-page spread from Future State: Swamp Thing by Ram V., Mike Perkins, June Chung, and Aditya Bidikar.
So, the balloons are drawn by hand, and the sound effects are drawn by hand. So it depends. For example, on Isola — apart from the main dialogue font — everything else is hand lettered. Including there's this weird language that comes up in issue three and on, that's also hand lettered. Then on something like Swamp Thing, only the sound effects are hand lettered. And the balloon tails — I always draw my own balloons. A lot of letterers kind of do this thing where they draw three points, and then they get a bend over the curves. Rather than that, I prefer to just draw it because I think it looks a lot more organic.
This was one of my early lines in the sand, where I realized that, you know, if you've got like a really nice curvy tail, it's much better to actually draw it rather than to kind of just draw like three points and then make it work that way. So that's when I realized that you can do certain things by hand that you can't do just digitally.
ARIEL: I think it's just amazing that you have the amount of output you do given that you spend so much time handcrafting these elements.
ADITYA: Yeah, that was a bit of an accident. Until 2019, I was fairly comfortable as in, I wasn't being offered that many books. So I could just accept every book that felt attractive, and then I could do it. But in 2020, a lot of people liked my work and offered me work. Going by my older principle, I just accepted everything that looked good and that was attractive. I mean, it's not even really about the money at that point. It's just that there are these fantastic creators and I want to work with them. And what I didn't realize is that I had accepted way more than I was able to do this year. And then I had to do it in a year anyway.
ARIEL: And what a year it turned out to be with all your fantastic work!
ADITYA: Thank you. Thank you.
The interview has been cut down significantly, but you can listen to the full interview that discusses translation, lettering in other languages, and the global perspective on the pandemic by navigating to ADITYA BIKIDAR on the website omnibusride.com/episodes.
Read more interviews with comics creators!
Ariel Baska has had many past lives, but right now she has a podcast, Ride the Omnibus, parked at the intersection of pop culture and social justice.
