On the Sins of Comic Sans

I like fonts. I have many many fonts. Fonts are cool.

Comic Sans, however, is not cool.

Todd Klein, perhaps the greatest letterer comic books has ever seen, addressed its myriad problems in a blog post about a year ago: “Comic Sans is nothing more than a way to label yourself clueless about comics, fonts, and good design.”

And, there have been documenataries on the problems of Comic Sans.

Why do people use it? Just because “it’s better than Times New Roman” is not a reason. Times New Roman is awful; I won’t work in it.

And it’s not like Comics Sans isn’t aware of the hate people have for it, though Comic Sans really don’t care what people think of it: “I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery.”

Comic Sans is just an awful, awful font.

That’s not to say that handwriting fonts don’t have a time and a place. I use Emerald City Fontwerks‘s “augie” for all my handwriting typography needs. That it looks not dissimilar to my own handwriting is a point in its favor. 🙂

Comic Sans? Blech. :sick:

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

2 thoughts on “On the Sins of Comic Sans

  1. Part of the problem seems to be the apparent ubiquity of a font that was designed for comic strip speech bubbles. The thing is, I’m not convinced it works in comic strip speech bubbles either. It’s trying to hard. It says “I want you to believe I’m hand-lettered, and I think you’re stupid enough to do so”.

    If someone’s using computer fonts in a comic strip, then they should use one that has the same “feel” as hand lettering, but probably not one that’s trying to ape it. Yes, the Times New Roman speech bubble probably looked ridiculous, but as you say, that’s not a reason for Comic Sans to exist.

  2. Thank God someone else believes it looks horrible even in comic speech bubbles! I have a friend who adores comics and doesn’t understand why I hate the font because “it looks just like comic books”. Absolutely not

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