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Æthelred
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Registered User regular
I was flicking through some comics today and I'm wondering why nearly all comics seem to have exactly the same font. It's not a great font either; it's always slightly italicised and amateurish looking. Is there a historical reason for this font?
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In this last issue of Detective Comics when the perspective switched to Robin all of his inner monologue was in a different font.
Apparently Robin thinks in cursive.
I notice a lot say they use that.
Off the top of my head:
Dolan's was a police manuscript.
Ellen's was a diary IIRC.
Spirit's was classic spirit.
The crazy scientist had green bubbles I think.
PARKER, YOU'RE FIRED! <-- My comic book podcast! Satan look here!
I think you've got a ludicrously simplified view of lettering in comics. Do yourself a favor and do not just flip through some comics if you feel the need to discuss the issue, especially when tossing out opinions that have such a clearly negative bias.
In the meantime, you can go read Sandman, Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis, and The Spirit. You can also go look up the name Todd Klein.
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It should.
off the top of my head, I think I'm going to use present-day venom, Reed Richards from 1602, a few examples of crazy blow up text a la Tony in CW7 "SPIDER-MAN!", an instance in Fantastic Four - where Sue's speech bubble turns into icicles, and Madrox dupes. After reading that comment about Robin thinking in cursive, I will probably go pick up the comic and put the in there as well. I'll probably give more examples, those are just the ones that come straight to mind.
PARKER, YOU'RE FIRED! <-- My comic book podcast! Satan look here!
Me, I think it's always really keen when someone gets their own handwriting made into a font, like Jeff Smith did for BONE.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
So thusly you see a lot of not so sane characters with varied fonts. Also, go read Sandman.
Delirium. :^:
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I looked at Sandman today (bought it for someone else; I'll borrow it off them later) and it has exactly the same font. I was a little surprised since from what I've gathered Sandman is a little more.. upmarket than other comics, as it were. I'm not a great fan of comics, but I was curious about the origins of this font. It just seems to do comics a disservice to me - it makes them all seem very similar to the outsider. yourspaceholiday: ta for the link; all I could find when googling was damn comic sans.
well, no it doesn't. any time any of the endless are speaking, that's a different font. same with lucifer, and various other characters in the series that escape my memory at the moment. the actual lucifer series also has a number of different font styles.
Cool beans; didn't flick through too much since I didn't want to spoil anything. The standard font is still the standard comic font though. I like when they use different fonts for different characters (although it's annoying as hell in anime as subbers usually choose a totally unreadable font to be different).
And that somewhat explains why there is a standardized font for comic book characters, barring extranormal entities like Thor or the Endless. If I'm meant to read a character as having conventional human speech, then anything that causes me to consider their words unusual (such as a difference between their font and the standard font for human characters) will go against that goal.
Meanwhile, extranormal characters with weird manners of speech won't seem so weird when every character has their a unique font.
And of course, a change in font from character to character might get irritating.
Tackle those first, then come back to comics.
Also INFLICTION can easily be detected when using standard fonts. I need to stop shooting down arguements today.
fix'd. I think.
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But there aren't a lot of great options for improving comic typography; there's not a lot of space for the word balloons, it's a PITA to create pleasant shape relationships between the letters and the word balloons, and taking the time to make comic book typography even begin to approach elegance would cost a hell of a lot more than just doing everything in a generic uppercase scrawl. Given that decades of crummy text in comic books has not turned readers off, there's little need to change.
The majority of newspapers don’t use the same font; hundreds of newspaper text fonts are in use around the world, along with thousands of other typefaces mixed in for headlines and decorative purposes. Message boards use proper quotes, most users just don’t have a clue how to enter them because they don’t appear on keyboards. Internet type may be limited by the selection of fonts the users have, but there are far more differences between Verdana, Times, Helvetica, Tahoma, Courier, Arial, Georgia, and Impact than there are in most simple comic fonts. As for book publishing, tens of thousands of typefaces have been used in books in the last decade, not too mention since Gutenberg.