Tom Orzechowski

Thomas Paul Orzechowski (; born March 1, 1953 ) is an American comic book letterer, primarily known for his work on Uncanny X-Men. Over the course of Orzechowski's career, he has lettered around 6,000 pages of long-time X-Men writer Chris Claremont's scripts.

Career Early work In 1968, when Orzechowski was 15, he met a group of aspiring comic book artists at the Detroit Triple Fan Fair comic convention, and joined their comics club. Some older members of the club included future comics professionals Rich Buckler, Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, and Mike Vosburg. An aspiring comic book artist, Orzechowski quit drawing when he saw their work. None of the club members wanted to letter their own amateur comics, however, so Orzechowski took on those jobs.

When all was said and done, counting X-Men, many of its annuals, The New Mutants, Wolverine, X-Treme X-Men, and MekaniX, Orzechowksi lettered something on the order of 6,000 pages of Claremont's scripts over a 25-year period.

Post-X-Men Orzechowski left the X-Men books shortly after Chris Claremont, in 1993. He joined the team putting out Image Comics' Spawn 1992, as a copy editor for most of its first six years. Orzechowski worked for the manga packaging outfit Studio Proteus from 1989 until its demise in 2004. Studio Proteus titles on which Orzechowski worked include Nausicaä, Appleseed, Dominion, and Ghost in the Shell.

In the early 2000s, with many publishers beginning to use "in-house" lettering teams, freelancers like Orzechowski lost a lot of work. Though Orzechowski still does the occasional job for DC Comics and manga company Studio Cutie, he did not letter comic books regularly until 2009, when he started lettering for Chris Claremont's X-Men Forever books, and in 2010 for the New Mutants Forever book, also written by Claremont.

, Orzechowski has been working on a comic book anthology called YEET Presents.

Lettering style and influences Orzechowski's letters are almost perfectly square, with the exception of the letter "I." Everything has a solid, uniform look to it. Letters stand straight up and down, not at a tilt. They are all painstakingly the same height. Similarly, Orzechowski's standard word balloon outlines are meticulously uniform. He also helped popularize non-standard (non-bubble-shaped) designs for word balloons, to reflect different character voices (square for robots, jagged/dripping for demons, etc.). In the mid-1970s, while Marvel's production boss and cover letterer Dan Crespi was developing a tight, attractive house style, Orzechowski was 3,000 miles away in California, "buried in design books." Orzechowski figured that "since the X-Men didn't overlap the rest of the Marvel Universe," there was no reason not to be influenced by calligraphy, record jackets, old movie posters – everything except comics.

Early influences on Orzechowski's distinctive style included the work of Alphonse Mucha, and the comics lettering of Artie Simek and Abe Kanegson. where he operates a typography and logo design studio. His wife is L. Lois Buhalis, herself a letterer in the comics industry for two decades.

Quotes

On his favorite lettering projects:

On the toughest parts of hand lettering to master:

On comic book logo design: