New Year 2011 (GMT)

Well, it's now New Year here in the UK, so I'd like to wish all the readers of this blog a very happy New Year. We cruised past 10,000 page views earlier this month, which just staggers me! 

I'd like to offer particular thanks to all the members of the lettering profession, whose party I've gatecrashed and who have nonetheless made me feel both welcome and supported. A huge thank you to everyone on the Digital Webbing forum and particular thanks for support and encouragement for this blog to Nate Piekos, Todd Klein and Clem Robins.

I'd also like to make a special point of thanking Clive Bryant at Classical Comics, and Ralph Tedesco and the team at Zenescope for giving me enough work to make lettering a viable living for me, and to everyone else who's been sufficiently impressed with my lettering to want to pay me for it!

On a purely personal note, I'd also like to single out two comments from the last couple of months:

Via Twitter, Dave Gibbons said "Enjoying your clear and useful blog," and went on to tweet "Suggest anyone interested in digital lettering heads over to Jim Campbell's excellent blog"

A few weeks later, I had the pleasure of lettering a strip for the always-fabulous Rufus Dayglo, whose kind words alone would have been enough, but he was good enough to feed back a comment from Mick McMahon when he showed him the finished pages: "That’s a nice page. And really good lettering and balloons, who does that?"

The art of Mick and Dave largely defined the whole 2000AD experience when I was growing up, and I attribute my lifelong interest in lettering to the fact that Dave lettered his own work. The idea that either of these guys would say anything complimentary about my efforts… well, it just exceeds my wildest dreams.

All in all, I have to keep pinching myself to remind myself that this is real. I feel incredibly fortunate, and I'll try to keep paying that back out via this blog, and any other way I can think of.

And, finally, I just wanted to offer a timely reminder that January 1st sees the annual Comicraft Font Sale with all their fonts up for grabs at a bargain $20.11 each for one day only. Treat yourself -- you know you want to!

So, once again, thank you to everyone for their support, for their feedback, or just for reading. I hope each and every one of you has a quite splendid 2011.

Cheers!

Jim