You always know when the lettering is wrong

Comic book lettering is something that is so easily taken for granted, but when it's done wrong, it's fucking awful and can ruin the whole thing. 

You can spot it straight away when it's not right, even if the only way to describe it is that it 'looks a bit wobbly'. Sometimes you get something like '80s John Byrne lettering his own work, and it's legible enough, but just doesn't work. 

There must be a solidity of font, a rigidness that can be hard to articulate, but always clear when it's done wrong. I always took the lettering seriously, before almost anything else - I could never read a comic where the lettering was done in some kind of typeset, because it felt hideously impersonal. It always had to be done by hand

I will always love and respect the long-game effects of decades of comics by dudes such as Ben Oda on DC's comics, or Tom Orzechowski's vital efforts on the X-Men, or the great Tom Frame and the absolutely splendid Annie Parkhouse on 2000ad.

Most of those creator's brilliance is invisible, and you only notice it when it's wrong (you can always spot a last-minute dialogue change because of the sudden drop in font quality), but there is also room for the ways Todd Klein and Dave Sim clearly enjoy showing off with their efforts, while comics from writer/artists as idiosyncratic as Eddie Campbell, Dan Clowes, Derf Backderf and Jaime Hernandez would literally not be the same with their words written in a different hand.

There are now lots of computer fonts that go to extreme levels to ape the hand of an actual human being, and I'm not that much of a font nerd to really notice the difference. But I still see lettering choices that are unmistakingly wrong, because you can always tell.