That's a panel from an issue of Superman drawn by Curt Swan but neither of those things matter to this post. What matters is the lettering in the panel. This was one of several trillion pages of comic art lettered by the late Ben Oda. I don't think Ben was the most prolific letterer ever in comics — I'd probably wager, if I had to wager, on John Costanza. But I also wouldn't bet against Ben on that because he might have been, especially if you counted newspaper strips. At one point, he was lettering twelve different daily strips — and not obscure ones; major features like Dondi and On Stage and Flash Gordon. I admired his calligraphy and I also admired Ben, if not for whom a lot of comic books would not have come out on time and a lot of artists would have had their incomes harmed as they waited for their lettering to get done. Ben always got it done.
What prompted me to write about Ben was that Brian Hayes did a nice post about the man and it made me feel guilty that I hadn't done a nice post about the man. I don't want to duplicate all the absolutely-true things Brian said about Ben so I'll just add a few things I know about him…
Ben loved his fellow comic book artisans. When I interviewed him and mentioned my connection to Jack Kirby, Ben practically threw his arms around me. He wanted to give me a hug to pass on to Jack, his one-time employer and one of the people who'd really treated him right, he said. Ben also had a standing offer that I thought was wonderful. About once a week (I am not exaggerating), Ben would be contacted by some comic book or strip artist who was trying to sell a new newspaper strip and was doing up samples and wanted to pay Ben to letter them. Ben's response was simple and consistent: Yes, I will letter them. No, I will not take your money. If you sell the strip, then you can pay me. He told me that since most strips did not sell, he felt guilty taking money out of the pocket of a fellow artist.
Ben was never late, especially if told that some artist (and it didn't even have to be a friend of his) needed work. Editors learned to tell Ben, "These pages need to be lettered overnight or Harry Splotchman, who's going to be inking them, won't have work tomorrow." Ben would get the pages done and personally drive them into New York City to deliver them. In fact, the one time he and I talked at length, it was at a comic convention in Manhattan on a Saturday. Ben made the trip in to deliver seven pages to an artist who was there and wanted to work on them over the weekend.
When Ben passed, DC Comics (and other clients) missed him in many ways but one was the sudden crisis in production. Ben was a vital component in the assembly line of comics and now he was missing. DC editor Joe Orlando told me this story.
Everyone had always assumed that Ben had a staff of folks working with him. I don't know where it came from but the assumption was that Ben had trained his wife and kids and maybe even the family dog to letter just like him. Given his awesome output, that seemed logical.
At Ben's funeral, Orlando decided he should approach Ben's family and let them know that DC wanted them to keep lettering for the firm. Joe knew that the production schedule would be devastated by the loss of Ben…but Joe was also concerned that the family had just lost its main source of income. So he told Ben's widow that she should send someone around to pick up lettering work.
She looked at him funny and asked, "Who would do the lettering?"
Joe stammered, "Don't you all letter? Haven't you all been doing a lot of that work?"
She shook her head. "We helped with erasing pages and ruling pencil guidelines but Ben was the only letterer." This was kind of like finding out that Walt Disney had animated Snow White all by himself. It eventually took about six people to replace Ben Oda at DC. But of course in a sense, no one ever replaced Ben Oda.
