Now, to be sure, some of this became overdone. There were some comics where virtually every character had their own font and/or word balloon style, and that could get downright distracting. But it did allow for lettering to become more than just conveying characters' speech; the text could become much more integral to the visual storytelling of the comic itself. In addition to being faster (i.e. cheaper) to do.
Now, part of the rant that Greg Rucka started that discussion with back in 2007 included him talking about the problems he saw introduced by the digital lettering on a comic he was working on for DC. "Nearly 50 separate mistakes, from missing punctuation to mixing up captions with spoken lines, right down to giving the lines to the wrong characters." Now, I think these were all fixed before the comic in question was printed, but the point that Starkings was making at the time was that, now having those font licenses, DC could have any computer-literate person do the lettering for a comic, and they may well not have any professional experience. Which meant that the previously lucrative deals he had set up doing a good volume of work for DC (and Marvel) could be done even faster and cheaper by someone else. By doing not only lettering work, but by creating and selling the fonts he used for his lettering, Starkings unwittingly kicked himself out of a job.
Clearly, he had no way of knowing how that would play out over the long-term, and he was doing what seemed best in the moment with the information he had at the time. My wife and I had a discussion just last night about whether we should this or that, and the pros and cons of both. One option would be much better under certain circumstances, and the other option would be much better under other circumstances, but we currently have no way of knowing what the actual circumstances will eventually be. So either choice, in hindsight a couple years from now, could look either wise or foolish depending on what else happens between now and then. My point being that we only ever make choices with limited information, and most people try to make the best choice they can with whatever they have/know at that time, and I don't doubt that was the case with Starkings back in the day.
But while he ultimately lost a fair amount of business by licensing his fonts to DC, he's kept up a career in comics over the past nearly-two-decades since then. He's still creating and licesning fonts; about once a year I see a flurry of independent creators excited about Comicraft's annual sale. Starkings has developed his own comics like Elephantmen which, while not frequent, seems to have enough fans to continue justifying his work on it over the past twenty years. And I think that's the key takeaway here.
Because we don't know what the future looks like, and we're making decisions now based on limited information, we have to be able to pivot as the reality of the world changes. I've said many times over the years that, with almost no hyperbole, every job I've taken since college did not exist five years before I took it. You don't need to necessarily be on the bleeding edge of innovation or technology to keep up in whatever industry you're in, but you do have to be ready to shift gears and change lanes as things change around you. Yes, technically comic book lettering is done on computers in much the same way that Starkings helped innovate back in the 1990s; the specific software is different, of course, and the comic art pages no longer have to be scanned since they're drawn digitally to begin with, but the act of copy-pasting a writer's script and selecting fonts and placements is largely the same. But more significantly, the industry itself shifted. The changes Starkings helped to innovate had business changes innovated on top of them, and he had to shift his personal approach accordingly.
The only constant is change, as they say. You don't have to embrace each and every change that comes along, of course, but you do need to be aware of how the industry is (or isn't) using them to know how to continue to work in the industry!
(Believe it or not, I was about three-quarters of the way through writing this before it dawned on me that I could well be writing about using AI here! The same conceptually framework certainly applies, but I was really thinking exclusively about lettering until the last couple paragraphs!)
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