“Superhero or Supervillain?” asked the New York Times on 13th November 2019 ($ paywall). “Technology’s Role Changes Comic Books” was the key thrust of the article, and that a change to computers hasn’t been quite as rapid as was once hoped in the white heat of the 1990s computer boom. Here’s the gist of the rest of it…
The “job of colorist and letterer has changed and been completely taken over by the computer … used to be a good inker was the best way to elevate a penciler’s work. Nowadays it’s a good colorist”. This is aided by better printing presses and nicer paper. Photoshop being the workhorse for colouring, on a Cintiq. A few will even “digitally color the main characters and paint the watercolor backgrounds by hand.”
The letterer “adds all the word balloons, editorial captions and sound effects to the page”. While he gets paid less to do more, due to the computer, he can still make more than the actual artist — due to the number of pages that can be zipped through in a day. Pro letterers working for big publishers tend to use Adobe Illustrator, and a few still even claim to do freehand lettering inside Illustrator.
Nothing all that insightful then, and the article is a bit lazy in not even mentioning 3D and Clip Studio and Poser and ComicCraft fonts. But I guess it helps to educate the masses a little.