The series, Sam and Twitch, while over 15 years old at the time of this writing, has a very modern lettering style that isn't typical to comics, past or present.
For those of you unfamiliar with comic book lettering, generally there are white filled in "balloons" that have a black stroke around them with the dialogue inside. A pointed "tail" leads the viewers eye to who specifically is talking in the given panel. Below is an example from Captain America.
Rick Remender (Writer) | John Romita Jr. (Pencils) | Klaus Janson (Inks) | Dean White (Colors) | VC's Joe Caramagna (Letters)
Richard Starkings, the main letterer, on the featured examples experimented with a different approach for Sam and Twitch.
As can be seen (above), the lettering takes a unique approach by eliminating the typical solid white filled balloons. Instead, the type rests on top of the image itself. A simple scribbled line is used in place of the pointed arrow that normally navigates to who is talking in the panel. The font itself is a clean sans serif that also goes against the more typical bulky "hand rendered" fonts.
For internal dialogue, Starkings uses sidebars (above) to hold the text. Frank Miller also used this successfully in his Sin City series. This treatment allows for a denser amount of text to be laid out with breathing room rather than trying to cram the text into a smaller confined panel or breaking it up into smaller chunks over many panels.
In this sample (above), we see how Starkings handled back and forth dialogue within a single panel. Again he used the simple scribble lines to connect who is talking and in what order. This maintains the uniqueness of the lettering style, however, it created the potential to make the flow of the conversation confusing.
Another drawback to this style of lettering is that it can make it more difficult to read against the background. The examples below aren't overly complex, but they highlight the poorer readability of the type with what it is interacting with in the background. Where normally if there was a filled in white word balloon all of the text would be fully readable regardless of the background image.
The font size doesn't vary drastically throughout the series unless someone is yelling. Sound effects are limited throughout the majority of the action scenes. The type color itself also had to vary from black to white dependent upon the darkness/lightness of the background image.
Conclusion
This lettering technique as a whole fit well with the tone of the writing as well as the series noir vibe. It created a sense of realism by breaking out of that standard style of comic book word balloons and brought a level of gritty polish to an adult based theme and audience. This particular style has it's limitations in terms of readability, but has the potential to stand out against the crowd of the industry norm for comic book lettering.
Here are the series credits for all of the Sam and Twitch artwork shown above.
Brian Michael Bendis (Writer)
Angel Medina (Pencils)
Jonathan Glapion (Inks)
Todd Broeker | Jay Fotos | Drew Hutchinson (Colors)
Richard Starkings | Comicraft (Letterer)
Release Year: 1999