Ira Schnapp

Sounds like Gerhard Shnobble or one of those made-up names from Eisner's The Spirit.

He was the designer of the Superman comic books masthead/nameplate (admit I had to google for the right term: according to which side of the pond you live the masthead/nameplate is the "title logo" that magazines or other periodical publications sport on the front cover).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Schnapp

I was actually looking for the person who designed the definitive "S" shield logo.

One of the many thropes of the super hero genre started by Superman, was the idea that a hero's costume would implement some sort of symbol, emblem or crest, often boldly displayed on the chest.

I can only speculate where this idea could have originated.
Frank Miller proposed his theory in a conversation with Will Eisner (conversation transcribed for the posterioty in the must-read book "Miller/Eisner" - a book that still injects me with some residual respect for Mr. Miller, or at least for his past output, but I digress..) that the printing quality was so shitty that characters had to wear their name spelled out in order to be recognized.

The Superman symbol went through a number of permutation in its eighty-years history, and gets regular redesigns to this day with every new reboot, be it on paper or on the silver screen.

However, one version of the symbol got to be the "official" (or rather trademarked) variant and I wanted to know who did the job.

Unfortunately I was not able to find out. But in my internet scouting for an answer I stumbled upon Ira Schnapp.

Comic-books historian and man with a taste for flamboyant outfits Arlen Schumer has a full lecture on this lesser known artist, who helped shape so much of the DC graphic identity over the years.

Likewise, calligraph extraordinaire Todd Klein dedicated quite a few posts to him on his blog. It' all worth reading.

Comics are a visual medium. On the top of my head I can only think to advertisement as the only other discipline that worked that extensively on the cusp where words become VISUAL OBJECTS, with meaning emanating not only from the IDEA sealed in the word, but from its visual presentation.

But advertisement is not an art (a pretty big statement I do not want to unpack here, even though I anticipate some antagonism to it), while comics is (note the singular).

Todd Klein

If you are looking for a quality, frequently updated, one-stop blog about comics, you can easily go to Todd Klein's.

Klein is probabily the most awarded letterer in the comic book industry, and deservedly so.

While lettering has often been seen as a painstaking and inherently rewardless job (not to mention labor-intensive), Klein managed to make it in to an art form.

To be fair, calligraphy is actually always been a respected craft thru history, but in comics it never had the opportunity to shine.

Publishers and editors tried at different times to revert to typographed lettering (I'm not sure that's the way you call it, but forgive me while I look for the correct word to use), but it never stuck. It seems comics can only accept hand-made lettering (or at least a computer lettering that looks like it has been designed by hand)


Thanks to a number of titles that required (or at least allowed) the letterer to be creative, Todd Klein specialized in creating unique fonts and modes for a number of characters and since became the letterer of choice for many prestige books.

But it is unfair to label Kelin simply as a letterer, he is one of the few people in comics who can actually do anything: writing, drawing, logo design, inking, coloring, editing...

The blog is more about his reads, his travels and also his job, but it is but a section of his Website, which includes essays and documents on how he does his stuff.

The article linked here is a very interesting account of how American comics used to get colored.

A very instructive read.