“Hire someone to do X for your comic or you look unprofessional” is terrible advice. Make what you can with what you have.
The internet is overwrought with free advice about what you’re doing wrong.
“You need to hire an editor for your comic.”
”Stop doing your own lettering! It looks amateurish. Lettering is an artform and you need a professional!”
“Hire a writer!”
“Hire an artist!”
Hire, hire, hire.
But here’s the thing about this advice: It’s a barrier. It’s a gate. And it can keep you from making the thing you want to make.
This is not to say that editors, letterers, colorists, writers, or artists or in any way bad or not valuable. But there is a hierarchy of needs, and each additional piece raises costs. For people just starting out, If you’re paying an artist $100 a page (which is cheap), you’re already in the hole $2400. Letterers are another $10 a page on the low end, and editors can be a few hundred an issue. Colorists are $50 a page on the lower end. Then there’s printing.
Just printing and art alone is going to put you in the $4000-5000 range. Any extra addition is one more dollar you’ve got to put up, one more backer you have to find, one more sale you have to make.
Will hiring a letterer make your book look better than doing it yourself? Probably. But you can learn to letter serviceably. I always hire letterers now because I don’t like doing it, but I lettered the first four or five things I did myself, and they look fine. One of them was published by Source Point Press. I’ve never heard any negative feedback about the lettering. I took the time to learn how to do it a little, and then I did it, because starting out I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on making comics, but I did have spare time to learn things.
This is also true of editors for me. Would my work benefit from an editor? Absolutely. But for my first few projects, not only did I not have the funds, but I had no idea what to even look for in an editor.
Every hire is another demand on limited resources. If you’ve got’m, use’m. But if you don’t, make your comic anyways. Even if you’re drawing stick figures, lettering in comic sans, and running off copies from the office photocopier at the place you temp at. Make your thing. Worry about hiring help when you’re in the position to do it. But don’t listen to all these people trying to tell you that you need to hire someone (often them) to even get started.