Next on My List: Remembering What I Know About Adobe InDesign

Looking at all of the speech and text bubbles is painful. They chaotic placement really annoys me. For my next series, I’m laying out the text bubbles first and drawing the pictures around them. I want to be like Hal Foster, the artist who wrote and drew the Prince Valiant comic strip for 45 years or so. His goal was to preserve his beautiful images by keeping all of the text at the bottom or top of the page. There’s not a single speech bubble in the many thousands of pages he created. Here’s an example of a drawing the would only be diminished by a grotesque speech bubble coming out of the Prince’s mouth.

This is an awesome picture. It blows my mind that Hal Foster could do a full page of comics every Sunday for 45 years and keep the quality at this level.