7 reasons to NOT use Comic Sans in your comic.
on April 1, 2010 at 6:00 amHere are my seven reasons to avoid using Comic Sans MS in your comic or graphic novel. I learned the hard way.
This may seem like a no brainer to some of you but I know that there are many who have no idea why Comic Sans is a bad choice. I know because I was one of them. In fact I completed three whole comics in Comic Sans MS and paid tons of money to print ‘em. I still have copies of these books and I’m embarrassed to try to sell my leftovers. Other newer comic creators have asked me to explain why Comic Sans MS is so bad so here is my list.
1. Just because it has “COMIC” in the name and it’s FREE doesn’t mean you should use it in your comic that you spent years laboring over. In fact, because it comes free on every computer in existence know to mankind, you might want to choose a different font for the sake of standing out from the massive crowd who blindly use it.
2. You will instantly look unprofessional to anyone who has already learned this lesson no matter how good your art or story may be. Designers and Letterers will want to roundhouse kick your face.
3. Comic Sans has uneven default kerning. Some letters are spaced weird which hurts the flow of reading. Below is an example of bad kerning. This is Comic Sans but I pushed the kerning so it was obvious to a non-letterer.
4. Comic Sans is an incomplete font when it comes to comics because it WASN’T really made for comics in the first place. For example, Comic Sans is missing breath marks which come before and after some sort of cough or sputter. (unless there is some special way of getting them I don’t know about.) Here is my own personal font with breath marks.
5. With many professional COMIC fonts, the lower and upper case letters are all capitals with a slight variation so that repeated letters can look somewhat random. Below is the same sentence with the top line in lowercase and the bottom in CAPITALS. Although the “I” stands out the most, they are all slightly different.
6. If you use the letter “I” with crossbars within a word, many letterers will want to drop kick you. In many comics the capital “I” with the crossbars is reserved for the personal pronoun only. Below is an example for clarity. Notice the “I” within the words “think” and “right”.
So which one is correct? That depends on who you ask. The majority agrees that the last one is correct. The top one is also fine. Some argue that “I’m” can be used either way and some argue that it should never have the crossbars unless the “I” is by itself. My main point here is Comic Sans only looks like the middle line which is by far the ugliest version.
7. Lettering is the one thing that people will stare directly at as they read your comic. Making it blend to your art is important. A badly chosen font will distract people from your work and story. Comic Sans will not only distract readers but get you hate mail. Good typography should be invisible. It shouldn’t call attention to itself unless there is a specific reason for it. Comic Sans will never be invisible because there is such a large group of people who hate it that you will most likely be hearing more comments about your font choice than anything else in your book.
If you are still in need of convincing then I encourage you to watch this video.
http://bancomicsans.com/home.html
Still not satisfied? Here is a great article about the history of Comic Sans.
http://sixrevisions.com/graphics-design/comic-sans-the-font-everyone-loves-to-hate/
Here is an article from a professional letterer talking about why he thinks Comic Sans MS should never be used for comics. I thought I had a pretty original list until I found this one. Oh well.
http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=3599
Here are some other posts I wrote about comic fonts:
Comic Sans has always looked awful to me whenever I saw it in other comics, so I don't think I'd ever use it anyway. I knew about most of the problems with it. But I didn't know about the crossbars in the ' i ' being a problem– I'll keep that in mind when I set out to letter my comic.
Thank you! Your blog is awesome.
Yeah that crossbar thing is a big one. Thanks for the comment!
How bout a bit of Times New Roman ;)
http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2010/twilight-g…
Haha. I never saw this before. I guess sparkling vampires can do whatever they want. ha.
Yeah, that's not much better than Comic Sans, now is it? Plus – the balloons are terrible! This is probably the best example of "how NOT to letter comics".
It's sad that it was inspired by such good lettering. It's nothing like the lettering on Watchmen… or pretty much any hand lettering I've seen in comics. Ever.
Agreed!
Good ol' comic-sans. After I got my barrage of hate mail regarding my use of this font I set out to pick a new one and happened to choose a font that has kerning issues that are 100 times worse then comic-sans! In fact for a good example of bad kerning check out pages 12-22 of my webcomic , though not for long, I have since found a font that I am very happy with and am in the process of re-lettering the whole first chapter (along with re-coloring over half of it.( the things I didn't know when I started are staggering)).
Haha, yeah man. I can totally relate. That's the whole reason I wrote this. Hopefully others can learn from our mistakes.
Comic Sans. Ooo. Oh, no. Blah and bleh. Blerrrrrrg.
Unfortunately, lettering is one art that has really, REALLY suffered in the digital age. Alas, with so many more cartoonists doing it all these days, hand-lettering is just one task too many, more often than not. I happen to have learned to letter by hand when I was trained in architecture, but I rarely have the time to do all those little word-balloon pasteups on my pages. The big problem is that the computer gives the illusion of infallibility – people trust that the computer knows what it's doing, or tell themselves that it's just the way it is, and end up compromising their results.
Personally, I use a suite of fonts called Komika, which is really quite good and very versatile. It was designed for the International Latin Alphabet (which lets me do all those accents and such that appear in French!), and it's pretty smooth-looking, and suitable for my comic, but even so, I always feel a little pang of shame every time I use it.
–M
Ditto for Komika.
Have you thought about creating your own font, I couldn't but if you can Letter you should try it.
Agreed. I bet you could make some great fonts.
One of my favorite webcomic artists used to handwrite all her speech bubbles in her earlier comics before she created her own font. While this seems tedious, It may help the artist get a feel for the emotion they want their speech bubbles to convey before they draft their final font. Just an idea.
hmmm… no comic sans huh… Fine, I'll just use Impact or Ariel.
Great post my friend. You're all about helping people. I like that. You and I should combine our powers somehow and attack this webcomic/graphic novel world together! Power in numbers right? Lemme know what you think. Aside from that, it might be good for some of the readers if some 'good' fonts are suggested. Having said that though, I think you may have discussed that in your other postings about fonts…. so never mind. :)
Haha, I'm just waiting for someone to slander my choice in using Impact for my title font.
I think combining forces would be AMAZING! Your work is very impressive and I can tell you are treating it seriously. Lets keep this conversation going! Love the new decision to make Rex in a standard page layout now. It's going to make a sweet looking GN when it's printed.
As far a good font choices? I never really went into it because I had the worst time knowing which ones were good. I just knew that I didn't like most of them that I could buy. That's the whole reason I chose to make my own. At least then I could make it look like my art.
I'll leave this question to be answered by anyone else. Mainly because I don't know.
I too used to use Comic Sans Serif at my comics, and never understood what is the big deal… I guess learning from your own experience is the best thing. Great article!
And yes, creating your own font is the best thing, could save you all kind of (potential) legal hassles later… personally I never had the time to invest in such an effort…
I was in the exact same boat as you with not understanding what the big deal was. It wasn't until Jim Campbell politely re-lettered some of my pages that I realized it really mattered.
Your lettering looks great by the way!
You used Comic Sans? Seriously? You can draw like this and you care so little about the appearance of your text that you used Comic Sans?
Lettering is important. It's how you convey half your story. It's where you show the nuances of a line's delivery. Some people, that's most of what they're going to actually look at.
Me? I letter my comic by hand. I let the letterforms shift casually, I'll think about size and placement to create mood. I'm doing this thing for love, on its own schedule; the ten minutes longer I spend on each page versus typing it out in the computer is ten minutes well-spent. Plopping out a computer font is okay if you're cranking out assembly-line stuff, but a personal project that you're pouring your soul into demands a bit more attention paid to the text than that.
"You can draw like this and you care so little about the appearance of your text that you used Comic Sans?"
Yep! That is how I use to be anyway. However I have learned some lessons the hard way as this article suggests and now I am trying to better my font making ways.
Wow, you hand letter your pages?. That's great that you can do that. I just made my own fonts and that's probably as far as I can go with it. Sometimes I hand letter specific parts to make it stand out but the whole thing? Wow.
If I were to hand letter my whole comic, it would take me years longer. You see, I redo the wording over and over and in the end, I'm going to have a writer go over everything and change it again.
Apart from the upper/lower caseinfo, you've basically said you dont like comic sans because other people in your industry don't like it. Is that enough? My friends don't like purple – should i warn ohers?
Honestly? Yeah. I know I'm lame. But after spending thousands on a comic and having my art overlooked because of a free font, (and on top of that, a hated font) I decided I needed to look into it more.
I'm just trying to help out other comic creators and some of us want to impress more then just our families with this stuff. Thanks for your comment though. It really got me thinking.
Kerning is the space between two specific letters. Tracking is the overall letter spacing of a line, phrase, or paragraph. For example, when working on a logo you'll adjust the tracking of the overall wordmark and then kern individual letters to remove / create false ligatures.
Other than that, you're dead on and completely right.
Thanks, Justin! Maybe I should use a quote from your comment in this article. I have little understanding of fonts in general. Only what I need to know to make my comic fonts better. Thanks for chiming in.
LOLOL. I’m a designer so I was aware of this but I’m so retweeting this post! I’m so sorry your past work has to be defiled with this terrible font! If you don’t know about Blambot.com yet, you might want to check it out, they have really great fonts for comics, both free and pro versions that can be purchased.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have heard about them before. In the end I just made my own. It's pretty easy and it's exactly what I want it to be.
That sounds perfect, how did you make it? I haven’t made a font in years and I have no clue what the current softwares are.
I have an article explaining what I know so far.
http://www.remindblog.com/2010/01/14/making-your-own-comic-font/
Even though Comic sans looks like the apalecic tumored doodle of a left-footed delusional mong dolt boy that has first poked himself up the honk with a whittled stick…you can't 'hate' it. The font itself might have a kerning issue, but it's not a bad font, most times it's the fonts application that's bad.
Comic sans should not be used on more than 10 words on the same page, period. It shouldn't be used on a page with more than 10words actually, so a couple word ad or something like a banner for an audience of 8yrs olds would be OK. It all depends on how you use i, while I love helvetica I've seen it used in a way that has made me cringe!
I totally agree. In fact I don't really mind Comic Sans outside of comics. I don't even care if a company uses it for their logo. Although it would be a terrible choice. I just don't like it for comics really. And the fact that it's called "Comic" Sans makes everyone assume it's perfect for comics. It IS perfect for little kid fliers at a school play. And perfect for an email sent to your grandma. (since it's so easy to read) ha!
epileptic* eek
Perhaps a non-sequitor, but check out http://lenischwendinger.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/postal-mortem-moynihan-station/ in regards to Ira Schnapp – Post Office stonecutter (“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night …”) and DC Comics graphic designer and letterer – if you research into his handwork you too will revert to the craft, not the pre-formed type!
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
I Agree! A ver well written article! :D
Thanks Paloma!
Ooh, I didn't know that trick with the "I"s. Though if it counts for anything, my handwriting naturally follows that rule…
Thanks for the helpful article! I'm one of the drop kickers, if you will… I hate Comic Sans with a burning passion. (Boy do my teachers love to use it, too… x_x) I read your other article on making your own fonts as well. I'm not quite ready for that, but I thank you kindly for the links to websites with good dialogue fonts to download!
Glad I could be some help!
This makes me want to make all my comics with Comics Sans. It's because I'm naturally contrary. :P
Haha. Yeah that could be funny to do on purpose knowing how people react to it. Go for it man!
Heh. One of the reasons I’ve liked Comic Sans was precisely because it was very readable to me, esp with the I’s… I have a long-standing hatred of Arial, Helvetica etc because they cannot make a distinction between ells and eyes (l, I) and it bugs the hell out of me… making me a proponent of Verdana (only because, it shows eyes from ells and was specifically made to be readable at very tiny sizes). Comic Sans does suck when it’s not big, though, it very quickly becomes unreadable…
which brings me to my last bit here: I can barely read your comic due to the font size. If you hadn’t made such a good font, I wouldn’t be able to read it at all.
Is it posisble to make those boxes a little bigger in the future??
Right click the image to see it full size. It's small because it's a double page spread on screen and wasn't really designed as a webcomic. It's intended to be printed in which the font size will be standard looking. Thanks for pointing that out tough. I should make this more clear for others as well.
Ooooh, yes that would be a good thing, it never occurred to me (it would have if I had tried View Image as I would if I were going to copy it). Yes, it’s quite readable at the full size…
Hm, of those who are making comics also for print, they have a ginormous original image, an optimised-for-web image for the online comic, and the ginormous image is optimised for print later.
So now off-topic question: I notice it’s a jpg. I hear a lot of comic artists like png’s (run through something like PNGcrush) to keep artifact out. Did you try this, and if so, was it still just too large a filesize?
You know. I’ve never tried it for reMIND. I love PNG’s for work projects and animation because of the reasons you mentioned. I believe it would be a better compression for flatter colors and simple line art. My files have so much texture and color that it seems like PNG’s would be pretty big files. I’ll have to try it on one and see the comparison. Thanks for bringing this up!
I have no opinion about Comic Sans, however, I do hate the online comic font that makes the 'f' look like a 'P' (see the word 'off' in the first panel here: http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=167…. At least I can tell what the Comic Sans 'f' is (that is, today when I looked on MS Word to see what a Comic Sans 'f' looks like). Whatever aesthetic values make graphic designers reject Comic Sans shouldn't be greater than being able to distinguish the letters.
Interesting point. I see what you mean about the f looking like a P now. I agree that clarity is more important than who likes it. I would still avoid any font that brings bitter arguments among such a large group of people. Comic Sans just happens to be one of them.
hmm,, I like this
I agrre with ur opinion…
too 'much' weaknes in font COmic Sans if it is used in a formal term.
nice..
I just read your stuff and it’s very interesting how comic sans is bashed. Im relatively new to making comics, 2-3 years working on them. Hell, making comics wasnt even something I was planning on doing, but here I am.
Here’s my opinion on the matter, and it’s a long one.
If you’re trying to work with Marvel or DC, you should do things they want. You can’t get a job with them if you can’t fulfill their requirements. Isn’t it like that for any job?
But if you’re just a self publisher trying to get your comics out there, and you’re happy with what you’ve done, using comic sans or a different type of art form, more power to you.
When I printed my books of GABRIEL, I first went to Tuscon. I almost lost my motivation. Nobody wanted to get my books because the store owners weren’t around. I finally went to a store with an owner there. He literally flipped through my book without stopping on any page and said, “Nobody’s going to want to buy this” and quickly handed it back. But that was one opinion. Of course, I didn’t feel that way at the time. My heart sank.
I went back to Sierra Vista where I was staying at and went to the local store. I was still feeling down, but he was my last stop. The comic book store owner bought 5 copies of GABRIEL because he liked what he saw. I told him what happened in Tuscon, and he told me, “Most of them are a bunch of snobs anyway. They think they know all about comics.”
Ever since, I’ve sold lots of copies of GABRIEL, received critical praise for it, it’s been selected for the SDCC, and I had 3 major film producers consider GABRIEL for a film. Oh yeah, and I won a grant from the XERIC FOUNDATION. The best compliment I ever received was from Javier Saltares (a great artist by the way) over at DEF-CON 7, Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was looking through my book and said, “You know what? I’ve seen many people try to do this type of work, but it seems like you pulled it off.” That made my freaking day!!! James O’Barr and Jason Aaron where there and they liked my book as well.
GABRIEL is lettered with comic sans.
There was a kid with his mom over in Dallas, TX asking for advice on how to make a book. A friend of mine started going through a list of what to do, WHAT LETTERING TO USE, how it’s hard, blah, blah, blah. He was visibly getting sad. I told him, “You know what? I’ve never done a comic book before and I wrote a graphic novel and won a grant. If I can do it, you can do it. Who cares what people say?” He and his mom were so happy with the advice I gave them and they bought my book, let me keep the change, and skipped his.
At the SDCC, I met this one comic group. They were really cool guys. No egos. We all shared advice and tips and laughs throughout the weekend. They’re comic books were professional looking, and had all sorts of different lettering. All the groups artists, writers, and letterers were pushing their many titles. I only had two titles, GABRIEL and THE RAILROAD KILLER, and it was just me and my wife pushing the book. Let me tell you, it was very, very tiring.
When the show was over, one guy told me they barely broke even with the table they purchased. He was somewhat disppointed. I felt bad because they worked hard and I really thought they were cool people. My wife and I made 4 1/2 times what the table was worth with two titles. One shots at that.
Not only did I use comic sans for GABRIEL, I used it for THE RAILROAD KILLER as well.
HELL PASO: THE STORY OF DALLAS STOUDNEMIRE will premiere on September 11 here in El Paso. I’ve already received a grant from Wild West History and will hopefully be covered by two large national magazines.
HELL PASO: THE STORY OF DALLAS STOUDENMIRE is lettered in comic sans.
My advice to people would be basically what I told the kid, just do it. Who cares what other people think? Although comic sans is bashed in “7 REASONS TO NOT USE COMIC SANS IN YOUR COMIC,” I’m a prime example of someone being able to successfully use comic sans in comics. For every person who comes and tells you your work sucks cuz you used comic sans, I guarantee, you’re going to get more people who are going to buy your buy because you have a great story. I have no problem when people give healthy critiques of comics, including lettering. But when they just resort to bashing your work, does their opinion really matter? Trust me, if customers aren’t buying comics an individual or a group releases, I don’t think lettering should be a main concern.
By the way, I’m not mad or even offended by the article. Nor am I mad at people who agree with it. But I do want to be able to let people know out there that if you believe in what you are doing and you use comics sans, it can be done and you can succeed. I believe in positivity. I’m extremely proud of my work. I’ve always had people in the past tell me I can’t do this or that. I’ve had friends and acquaintances tell me I shouldn’t do this or that in comic books. And I always prove them wrong. But I don’t write comics or do things to prove people wrong. I DO IT FOR ME AND DO IT FOR MY WIFE BECAUSE SHE SUPPORTS MY WORK. That is why I succeed.
But seriously, reading all this bashing reminds of the “comic book art is not art” debate or”Nirvana sucks cuz they only know three chords.” Whos cares? What someone hates, someone is going to like.
And at the end of the day, if people still disagree with me, and say I’m wrong and that comic sans sucks and ruins your art, again:
GABRIEL w/comic sans = PETER A. LAIRD XERIC FOUNDATION GRANT!
HELL PASO w/comic sans = WILD WEST HISTORY GRANT!
http://WWW.MYSPACE.COM/JIMMYDAZECOMICS
http://WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/JIMMYDAZECOMICS
I glad to hear of your success with Comic Sans in your comics! Like I said in my article, I published a few comics in Comic Sans too. I can understand why you would want to defend the font after using it so much. But that's all in the past as are MY old comics that use Comic Sans.
My point is this. In order to keep growing as an artist, we need to keep trying to move forward. Just because we had limited success before doesn't mean we should stop trying to improve. Improve the art, the coloring, the FONT. It's all part of the whole picture. It's great you won grants and sold books but I doubt any of that credit should be given to the fact that you used Comic Sans.
If I sell lots of copies of my book and it has tons of spelling errors in it, does that mean I can continue that pattern in my next book? I could argue that my bad spelling didn't hurt the success of my first book so it doesn't matter. Or I could keep trying to improve my spelling.
It's fine for a first timer to do it however they want, just like you and I did with our first books, but if we want to keep growing and getting better then that's another story.
Thanks for the thoughts and long comment! I appreciate your opinion and I hope you continue to have success with your comic career.
Breath marks can be used in plain text (i.e. regardless of font) as Unicode characters U+269E and U+269F, like ⚞this⚟. Of course not many fonts are populated for these two codepoints (see http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/269e… ), but if you’re designing a font with breath marks these are the codepoints to use in order to make it standard (= interchangeable, expected, independent from private convention).
Too bad that these two Unicode characters’ properties are not bracket-like.
Hi Jason,
I’m sorry. I never noticed that you responded. Thanks for the best wishes and much luck to you as well. I just wanted to let people know that one can succeed, even if others have differing opinions on certain things. I don’t mind people who critque my book or others. But it’s another story when people just bash people’s work or make fun of stuff with no real input on how to improve. Don’t worry, this isn’t an attack on you. I’m just talking about personal experience.
You know, my friend and I were talking the other day about comics, and somehow fonts came up. And the question was brought up: Did you ever turn down a comic book because of fonts? We all said no.
Yeah, I didn’t win the grants for the fonts. But the fonts didn’t hinder the work either. :) If anything, I’d be critiquing other stuff way before my lettering. But like my wife says, “You’re always critical about your work.” And I usually am. I totally agree with improving as an artist. I always want to do better. But I’m limited with resources, so I use what I have, and I’m totally fine with it.
Again, I’m sorry for the late response. It wasn’t my intent to ignore your reply. Well, I’m out. I need to get ready for school. Take care, and again, much luck with everything, Jason.
jimmydazecomics@hotmail.com
http://WWW.MYSPACE.COM/JIMMYDAZECOMICS
http://WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/JIMMYDAZECOMICS
I’ve always hated Comic Sans font! by the way, excellent website very informative indeed. Keep it up!
I’ve been browsing online more than three hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It’s pretty worth enough for me. Personally, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the web will be much more useful than ever before.
Very well put. While I knew to avoid Comic Sans, you showed me several reasons beyond my own that I am now glad to know.
The only time I’ve really used that font was for my brother’s pokémon homepage when I was a kid, and even then, I felt it was best used at 12 pt and against a darker, maybe patterned background, if at all.
meh. I’m a big visual person – I won’t read a comic if it’s visually unappealing in any way – not simply the drawing, but the layout, too can turn me off (I mention this because I thought this was the norm, but I’ve found I’m the only one of my comic-reading friends that worries about this – they value the writing much more highly than the art, but I hold both to an equal standard).
Back to the topic at hand, despite being visual, I don’t care if a comic producers uses comic sans. If the comic can be read easily (which depends more on panel flow than font, imo), who cares. FWIW – the third “I think I’m right” is the worst looking one of the three, imo, because it’s inconsistent. But would that turn me off a book? No. Would it even make me go, “Ug! So unprofessional!” Nope. Maybe it would make a letterer think that, but unless you’re making comics only for letterers, why let that bother you?
I don’t use comic sans – I agree it looks weird. But a lot of fonts look “weird”, and they don’t get mocked as much as CS.
I need to agree whit many things you said here, also, this article is perfectly writed.
But there’s just one think burning my mind. All this hate about this font so called “Comic Sans” came from what?
“7 reasons to NOT use Comic Sans in your comic.
| reMIND” ended up being a quite nice posting, . Continue posting and I’ll keep on following! Thanks -Elana