There’s one last thing I do have to ask about in terms of the “Twilight” book, and that is that there are certain people in the comics industry who were a little non-plussed with the lettering in the graphic novel, both in terms of it not looking like more traditional letting in its technique and in terms of there being some awkward placement and such. How did some of those production issues and choices come about?

Well, those weren’t production issues. There seems to be a misconception within the comics community here about how that was put together. When you’re working in American comics, yes, it is standard to go out and assign a letterer to letter a book, but that is not what you generally see in Asian markets. It’s not what you see in Japan and in Korea. So for the original books that we work on, we ask the artists to do the book themselves. This was not a book that was lettered by a letterer…this was lettered by the artist.

And as far as the balloon work goes, a lot of what I heard was “Oh, these are just randomly placed.” That is absolutely not the case. When you’re talking about a professional letterer working in comics, the role of the letterer is to stay out of the way of the art. You would absolutely never see a case where the letterer is allowed to place a balloon over a character’s face. When the artist is doing the balloon work and she’s selecting where that lettering is, if she places a balloon over a character’s face, there’s a reason for it. I’ve seen one panel held up time and again as “How was this done?” Well, it was done because the artist had a very specific reason for putting it there. [Laughs] It’s funny, because I see a lot of the comments, and I’ve seen some people speak to that because they recognize what she did. But people aren’t looking at the book and trying to ascertain why the book was done that way. They’re putting the presumption of how things are done in this industry and trying to apply it to a case where it’s the artist making that call.

You can read the full interview here: http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=26401

Personally I don’t care for Twilight. Anymore. But if I was still as fangirlly about it now as I was a couple years ago, I would have totally freaked in a very good way. Especially since I was heavy into manga/anime. It’s cool for the fans, though, but I have the feeling that most of the Twihards really won’t pay much attention to the negative aspects of the graphic novel.