Being a Manga Letterer Is More Than Having a Fun Job

When people read manga, they often focus on the Instagram caption-worthy one-liners and larger-than-life illustrations that fill their pages. What usually goes unnoticed in picking up a manga is the work that goes into its lettering and graphic design, done by the folks who pour their craftsmanship into typesetting popular Japanese manga for Western audiences.

We spoke with professional letterers Brandon Bovia (The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy at All, Dragon Ball Super, Kaiju No. 8), Evan Hayden (Battle Angel Alita, Land of Lustrous, Akira), Sara Linsley (Kamudo), Aidan Clarke (Otaku Elf, Neo Faust, Les Miserable), Barri Shrager (Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?), Kyla Aiko (Dandadan, Gokurakugai), and Finn K. (Shinobi Undercover, RuriDragon) about the challenges of typesetting the best manga in the world.

Manga Lettering in a Nutshell

The job of a manga letterer is a collaborative process between publishers and translators where typesetters bring together all the minutiae of text folks would read in a manga—even if it means designing fonts themselves.

“If you look at a page of manga, virtually all the text you can read in English was placed there by a letterer. Letterers are localizing everything from restaurant signs to handwritten love letters. If the reader is meant to read it, then the letterer has to localize it. The kinds of things we have to localize vary from genre to genre,” Linsley said.

Using programs like InDesign, PhotoShop, and Acrobat, letterers localize the typography of a manga for Western readers. Depending on the publisher, a letterer’s graphic design and typography job description may also include working on the manga covers, table of contents, and other pieces of iconography beyond setting dialogue in speech bubbles and translating onomatopoeia sound effects. Furthermore, letters are also tasked with stylizing the font in the manga. Although this process sounds like it could be straightforward—swapping out Japanese with English—the lettering process is actually a complex amalgamation of art and science.

“There’s a misconception that fan translation is the same as professional translation, and those experiences are used to make assumptions about the manga industry. For example, some folks believe that the same person will translate and letter a page, when that’s very rare in the professional sphere. Some folks assume that lettering is easy, or that it’s just copying and pasting text from the translated script. Lettering is an art, and sloppy lettering can ruin a localization,” Linsley said.

Another element of manga lettering that differentiates itself from lettering in Western comic books is that workers must adapt every word in manga art to English. In layman’s terms, manga letterers must erase handwritten Japanese text elements and replace them with English text elements. This extends beyond dialogue in speech bubbles to translating signs—be they on the road, or in apps and text on smartphones (which can be super tricky)—and flamboyant sound effects.

“Even if the original manga page was created digitally and the sound effects are on a separate layer from the character and background art, those layered files are seldom available to companies that want to localize the manga. The act of erasing and redrawing manga art is often referred to as retouching, and manga letterers are sometimes credited as having done ‘lettering and touch-up art,’” Aiko said.

As the letterer of Yen Press’ popular girls’ love manga, The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy at All, Bovia can attest to the challenging aspect of retouching a manga whose identity is tied to the green layer associated with the identity of its busy panels.

“If something needed to be retouched, it needed to be retouched twice—both in black and white and green. Then add the green back into the new English text,” Bovia said. “The final result ended up being a lot of fun, but that one really pushed me to my limit. And I was juggling eight other books at the same time.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hayden goes the extra mile by hand-drawing his work using a bounty of ink pens on paper, especially if he’s working on an older manga.

“If I’m working on a classic manga, I really want to make things look as not digital as possible. I try to avoid using fonts for my sound effects. On Ashita no Joe, I’m doing all the sound effects by hand and ink, which takes a long time, but that’s how the original artist did it,” Hayden said. “A modern manga looks fine with modern fonts, but an older one doesn’t. That’s personal preference.”

While publishers have streamlined some of the day-to-day lettering processes by using Wild Words as their default font, there are areas of specificity between publishers. For example, manga publisher Seven Seas requires letterers to use 100% auto leading, whereas Yen Press instructs them to use font size plus one for leading.

“That results in very different-looking implementations of the same font between those publishers,” Clarke said.

Adding font standards in the mix with other overarching graphic design faux pas and no-nos—like the ongoing debate over the implementation of the dreaded cross I’s use-case in manga, wrapping of text, over-hyphenated words, and other niggling graphic design annoyances—can go unnoticed by the everyday reader but stick out like a sore thumb to a letterer.

“Some folks assume that lettering is easy, or that it’s just copying and pasting text from the translated script. Lettering is an art, and sloppy lettering can ruin a localization,” Shrager said.

Pay, Work, and Life Balance

While being a manga letterer might sound like a fun gig anyone would be lucky to have, much like with any job, balancing work, pay, and safeguarding one’s personal life can be a tumultuous balancing act. For starters, a weekly 19 or 20-page series can pay a letterer $4-20 per page depending on the publisher and scope of the work. A monthly volume can take 30-50 hours on the light end, and 70-100 hours on the heavier end to complete within a month’s deadline. Depending on how demanding the project is, monthly pay can wildly vary, with rates at $1,000 (or lower) to $2,000 (again, depending on the project). Mind you, some of these rates haven’t changed much since 2013 for letterers.

“I feel like if I had a few more series that paid well enough, I would make this a full-time job with a very small yearly salary (we’re talking $40-60,000 max). But currently I do other side hustles to earn [more] money. Workload-wise you can easily spend more than a typical 40 hours a week and not be making nearly the same as someone working an office job,” Shrager said.

“I would even say that $1000 these days—things are expensive—doesn’t take you as far as it used to when I started [in 2017],” Bovia said.

Requesting time extensions from a publisher isn’t like pulling teeth because most production schedules have a built-in cushion for emergencies. However, even this security blanket has an element of a double-edged sword.

“As a freelancer, you don’t want to ask for extensions too often. If you’re consistently behind on your work, clients can and will drop you from their projects,” Linsley said.

In addition to managing their time on a manga project, letterers must consider the amount of work they are taking on from publishers and meet deadlines, as no letterer works on only one manga at a time.

“If you really want to do your best for something, then you got to put in some incredibly long hours. Whether that means you’re lettering a manga or whether it means you’re making the next Grand Theft Auto game. People have to work crushing hours to make that happen,” Hayden said. “And if you’re a freelancer, you’re getting whatever you’re getting, whether you do it quick or slow. You have to force yourself to try to work fast, which sometimes can lead to lower quality, which doesn’t make you feel very good.”

Despite putting in what is akin to full-time hours, most letterers are contract workers laboring on multiple manga chapters and books simultaneously to make ends meet. At the same time, some letterers jerry-rig their workflow so that they’re ostensibly working a full-time job lettering. Rather than feeling like the industry, which has had its systems in place for 20 to 30 years, is making strides to be equitable for letterers, most feel like they’re taking strides in the opposite direction. While it might seem like big-money manga titles would be able to provide full-time pay for letterers, the only company that hires full-time in the United States is porn. Fakku, the largest English hentai manga and doujinshi publisher, is one of the only places that hires letterers full-time.

“The manga industry is notorious for contractor-only work; it’s pretty cutthroat. Right from when we started publishing manga 10 years ago, I had a goal to improve the industry and make this a real career for people,” Fakku founder Jacob Grady told io9.

He continued: “All of our typesetters are full-time salaried employees, with health insurance/vision/dental all 100% paid by the company with a 401k retirement plan. The goal is really to make this a long-term career for people, and provide job stability for our employees.”

The things I do out of love, y’all. pic.twitter.com/46SsP9Od8V

— Brandon Bovia | Beyblade X volume 1 available now! (@brandonbovia) January 13, 2025

While there will certainly never be any shortage of readers wanting to read manga “for the plot,” most manga letterers are contract workers or freelancers who try to make ends meet by supplementing their income with a second job.

“It’s a really hard thing to make ends meet with. I know a number of people who have that as their full-time job, and there are only a select few of them that I don’t see getting actively crushed by it,” Clarke said.

Freelance letterers can face instances where invoices aren’t paid out promptly or piecemeal, making the work process all the more challenging.

“Manga lettering is my main source of income, and while what I’m paid works for me most the time, it’s not my only source. I have a part-time job that I’ve held the entire length of my lettering career. Part of the reason is because, while getting work consistently hasn’t been an issue, getting paid in a timely manner has been and that’s a little stressful even if the money’s good for me,” Finn K. said.

He continued: “On average, it takes three weeks for an invoice to come through for me; sometimes I wait a month. The longest I’ve had to wait was a little over two months, and that was hard.”

While the pay at bigger publishers is more rewarding for most letterers, getting paid in unpredictable timeframes makes the cycle of finding more work and paying bills a stressful ordeal, to say the least. Despite this, letterers balance their workload by typesetting manga monthly or weekly.

AI Is Not a Solution

As the use of AI spreads in nearly every arena of entertainment, tech startups like Orange, Inc. have become pervasive in the manga industry. While companies of this ilk promote their services as a solution to get more under-appreciated manga localized to people in a timely fashion, letterers feel they are no more than a grift. In opposition to publishers eyeing up AI start-ups as a means to maximize production, letterers feel publishers should open up lines of communication with their employees (i.e., letterers) and ask them for solutions the industry is facing.

“People are interested in comics because they are a form of art. They’re not just content. They are something that people have put a lot of thought, care, and effort into creating,” Clarke said. “Not trying to match that passion and effort in the presentation is disrespectful to the people who created these comics in the first place. Automation is a very useful tool that individuals can use within their workflows, but consigning so much of that creative process over to automated methods robs it of that spark.”

Despite the encroachment of AI, the manga industry faces other persistent issues. As mentioned earlier, low rates are a big one, making the role of a letterer both mentally and physically taxing for workers.

“Rates are fairly stagnant. I’ve seen companies make efforts to raise rates, but it’s been a slow process. As new companies enter the manga localization market, sometimes it seems like rates are at a race to the bottom,” Aiko said. “It would be great to see manga lettering rates catch up to even the low end of Western comic lettering rates.”

Linsley added, “The pay is so low that letterers have to overload themselves. I had to stop lettering as my main source of income because I was working 70-hour weeks just to make an average income with no benefits.”

In tandem with low rates, letters feel like the industry’s structure, which relies on contract work from typesetters, prevents years of knowledge to get passed on to letterers in a mentorship capacity outside of folks hitting colleagues up on social media.

“Over my years of lettering manga, I think, because there isn’t any sort of mentorship, you have a new letterer starting from scratch. That doesn’t have to be the case. There can be systems in place to ensure people can do this long term as a career,” Bovia said.

Publishers Should Invest in Workers

Rather than waiting for solutions to manifest, letterers propose ways the industry can improve and prevent the above challenges from persisting, starting with investing in workers. Letterers we spoke to proposed publishers consult with them for solutions, more open calls for letterers, keeping lines of communication open between contractors and in-house employees, allowing freelancers to negotiate wages, and raising wages to match the modern cost of living.

“There are publishers out there that’ll [hire you] for $600, $500, $400, which is really not much money for your time. If you’re just starting out, it’s really tempting to take those low rates if you’re not being offered anything else,” Bovia said. “Because there’s no career path here, it’s just down to luck and being in the right place at the right time. That doesn’t feel like the best way to run things to me.”

While much of the above can deter any bright-eyed hopeful looking to dip their toes into the profession, every letterer we spoke to encouraged folks to make time for their hobbies and not sacrifice their precious time (and weekends) for endless work.

“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to pay the bills, but you also have to respect yourself as a human being, an artist, and a citizen to get enough money to live a life,” Hayden said.

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