Todd Klein

Todd Klein (born January 28, 1951) is an American comic book letterer, logo designer, and occasional writer, primarily for DC Comics.

Biography

Early career Todd Klein broke into comics in the summer of 1977, hired by DC Comics as a staff production worker. This job entailed pasting together text pages (such as letter columns), putting logos, display lettering, and type on covers, and doing art and lettering corrections on comics pages. Other staffers included colorists Bob LeRose and Anthony Tollin, writer Bob Rozakis, inker Steve Mitchell, and letterer John Workman. Over the next months and years, Klein tried his hand at all those things, but found lettering suited him best. Workman helped Klein get started with the basic tools and techniques, and Klein studied the work of Gaspar Saladino, Workman, Ben Oda, and John Costanza; as well as Marvel Comics letterers Tom Orzechowski, Jim Novak, and Joe Rosen. Klein landed his first freelance lettering job in the fall of 1977, and by late 1977 was entrusted with an entire issue: Firestorm #1.

Freelancer In the 1980s, Klein mainly worked for DC, where in addition to lettering many of their titles, he also designed logos and title headers for various letter pages. As DC emerged from a late 1970s/early 1980s slump, new opportunities opened up for freelancers. Klein got more work as a letterer (and also a fair amount as a writer), keeping him very busy. Books he worked on during this period included Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, Batman: Year One, and Detective Comics; as well as his own scripts for Omega Men. As a freelancer, Klein also performed production work on such works as Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, Frank Miller's Ronin, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Klein discussed the process by which he came up with these distinctive styles on his website: "Each of them needed some sort of special lettering style. . .to show that they are all equals in their iconic power. Destiny's speech was simply italic (really just slanted) [...] Neil had a specific idea about Delirium's style, that it represent a sort of mad variety, getting louder and softer, like something going in and out of focus. This was fun to do in small amounts, but tedious in large ones. Despair just had a rough balloon edge to denote a ragged, rough voice. (Destruction, when we finally met him, had an extra bold border to denote a loud, booming voice.)"

Technique To read about Klein's technique one need look no further than The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics, published by Watson-Guptill Publications. In this guide, Klein gives a thorough review of how he mentally approaches a page and then goes about doing the actual lettering, either by hand (pen and ink), or by use of the computer (Adobe Illustrator).

Computer lettering Klein saw the growing prevalence of computerized lettering in the early 1990s and quickly realized it was the wave of the future. He had met Comicraft owners Richard Starkings and John Gaushell at the 1993 San Diego Comic-Con, and in 1994, he asked them to help him get started with computer lettering by creating a few fonts based on Klein's hand lettering. Klein bought his first Macintosh computer in late 1994 and started learning how to make fonts himself. Since 1995, Klein has created a library of over 100 of his own fonts.

The first book that Klein fully computer lettered was Image Comics' Deathblow #20. Some of the notable logos he created during the period 1977–1995 include the Batman logo used for the Batman: Year One storyline, The New Teen Titans (including character logos for team members Nightwing, Starfire, Raven, Cyborg, Changeling, and Jericho), Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld, Camelot 3000, Doctor Strange, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Magneto. Notable logos from this period include Challengers of the Unknown, Silver Surfer, Legionnaires, Iron Man, the Legion of Super-Heroes,

Action Comics: "Re: Action," All-Star Squadron: "All-Star Squadroom" Ambush Bug: "Letters to Me" Animal Man: "Animal Writes" Arion: Lord of Atlantis: "Spellbound Scrolls" Blue Beetle: "Beetle's Nest" Blue Devil: "Circuits & Sorcery," "Speak of the Devil" Booster Gold: "The Gold Exchange" Captain Atom: "Quantum Quotes" Creeper: "Crazy Talk" Demon: "The Hell You Say" The Flash: "Fleet Sheet" Green Arrow vol. 2: "Sherwood Forum" Hawkman: "Pinions"

L.E.G.I.O.N. '89: "L.E.T.T.E.R.S. '89" 'Mazing Man: "'Mazing Mail" New Talent Showcase: "Talk About Talent" New Teen Titans: "Titan’s Tower" Omega Men: "Omega-Mail" Sandman: "Letters in the Sand" Secret Origins: "Secret Admirers" The Shadow: "Shadowmania" The Spectre: "Speculations" Star Trek: "Hailing Frequencies Open" Suicide Squad: "Suicide Notes" Thriller: "Filler" Vigilante: "Vigilante-grams," "You, the Jury" The Wanderers: "Homing Signals"

Marvel In the 1990s, Klein designed or redesigned a number of Marvel's letter column headers:

The Amazing Spider-Man: "The Spider’s Web" Marvel Team-Up: "Web-Zingers"* Spider-Man Unlimited: "Spider-Readers Unlimited" Spider-Woman: "Venom Blasts" X-Men Unlimited: "Unlimited X-citement"

Awards , Klein has won 18 "Best Letterer/Lettering" Eisner Awards that have been given out since the category was established in 1993. He has won the Best Letterer Harvey Award nine times, the first time in 1992 and the most recent one in 2013.