Comic Book Typography

I'm eager to see OpenType "randomness" à la FF Kosmik applied to more handwriting fonts. The problem now is that the more quirky a hand-lettered font is, the more obvious it is that it was done on a computer and not by a human.

Yeah, that's really true what you say about handwriting fonts. The biggest problem is when you run into double characters. I've thought about adding alternates for those situations to my Felt Tip Roman. Even without them, people have found ways to overcome it by using baseline shift, scaling letters, etc. Maybe there will be a Felt Tip Roman Pro. :-)

Comic book lettering is different from handwriting, though. It comes from mechanical drawing lettering. It's very precise and contolled. There's less of a random quality to it so it's less obvious when it's turned into a font. Even so, the more professional ones (i.e., the ones that aren't free) tend to have two versions of caps, one on the uppercase and one on the lowercase. These tend to be all-cap fonts so it's a convenient way to do it.

I've observed that people don't often use alternates when they are available. Automatic substitution would be a really good thing for both types of fonts.

The code for flipping consecutive double characters is very simple if you only want it to apply to double characters. If you have FontLab, it can take less than five minutes.

Increasing the "flip radius," i.e. flipping identical nonconsecutive characters, causes your code to grow geometrically in complexity. That's when you might want to hire someone or devote some time to study. But simple contextual alternates are something every FontLab owner should try for himself. I'll see if I can post a tutorial shortly.

I read the OpenType chapter in the FontLab manual recently and it did look pretty simple. I'm looking forward to investigating that stuff more once I get up to speed on FL.

Amazing to me how long this discussion has been going on. More than ten years ago David Siegel (of Tekton fame/infamy) told me he was working on a version for a planned font format called TrueTypeGX, which would have the ability to randomly select alternate versions of characters for greater verisimilitude. I kept looking for TrueTypeGX, but it never materialized. I'm still excited to see this possibility come to life.

Hi Dave,

Tekton has the singular honor of being the only font ever to get public release in GX, Multiple Master and OpenType versions. It was the only Type 1 GX font that I know of ever existing. The GX version had small caps, old style figures, and possibly a larger character set. It came with System 7.5 or thereabouts. The MM version didn't have those features but did have continuously variable weight and width. It came with Adobe Type Manager 4.0. The Pro version "froze" the extreme instances of weight and width around the regular, and added back the rich features. I believe Tekton Pro was bundled free with InDesign 1.0. It's probably the most bundled Adobe font outside of the original PS 35.

And I remember Adam Twardoch saying that a Multiple-Master OpenType version of Tekton was actually shipped with some beta Adobe software.

hhp

OK, but I'm still waiting on the 4-pixel-high small-caps Tekton bitmap. No Tekton collection can possibly be complete without that!

It's very difficult to do a very good comic book font with the good balance achieved by comic letterers by hand.
Being a comic reader (of any kind) since my birth, and having started reading American comic books in their original edition around 1986-87 I witnessed most of the trials and errors done in various countries before reaching a decent quality.

There were countries (like Germany) where many comics (at least the translated ones) were typeset in actual typefaces (Helvetica being the most common, Hrant you are allowed to vomit). There are many examples of this since the early 1960s in many other countries as well.

I've said it's difficult, apart from all the natural feeling you will be able to achieve with the great OpenType features, because it largely depends on the quality of the original on-paper lettering. Certain styles lend themselves better to a digitization, others are a dysaster. Bad spacing is crucial, since it betrays immediately the mechanical "quality" of the lettering.
Piekos did some nice things but I recall many of his early faces lacked good spacing.
But it's not that simple: even in the Comicraft library there are many "cold" faces, if you know what I mean.
WildWords Plus (used first as a custom font in Jim Lee's comic book W.I.L.D.Cats) is probably among the finest, but its piracy and abuse makes it pretty ubiquitous (and nauseous).

Anyway, like black and white photography, manual comic book lettering survived the revolution, and continues to grace the pages of a number of original comic art pages, luckily.

Kosmik was so ugly you could have put 100 versions oif each letter in it, it would have continued to look like bad lettering and not a comic book font.
I still wonder why did they used it for that great idea that was the Flipper application.
My taste, anyway.

Claudio--Thanks for your insights on comic book fonts. I don't follow comics nearly as closely, but I find the phenomenon interesting. Here's an artform that never had much use for type embracing and bending it to its own ends all because it's become technologically practical to do so. I'm sure there are other examples.

Digital typography made the typesetting profession obsolete, but more people are using type than ever before, and in new ways.

This is so annoying. I understand from whence came the ignorant and uninformed opinions of the Average Comic Sans Detractor, but I would expect type designers to know better.

Comic Sans is a screen-optimized font. The design took a back seat to the demanding pixel medium. I defy anyone to show me a single comics-style font that looks better than Comic Sans at text sizes on a screen. Keep scaling them down lower and lower, and tell me which one becomes illegible first.

Fonts are not just for printing, you know.

John, come on. Comic Sans's wishy-washy curves are not justified by its screen-optimized priorities. You can do both. Just look at all the other MS core fonts.

Hinting CS was certainly a technical tour de force, due to its irregularity, but the type of irregularity that makes CS so offensive is unrelated to the sort that makes hinting harder. Ergo: reducing hinting effort is not the reason for its aesthetic failing.

A counter-example would be the disproportionate weight of the MS core font Bolds: they are indeed too bold because that made them much easier to hint. You'll never get them to admit it, except indirectly in something Vincent himself once candidly wrote:

"For both Verdana and Trebuchet we made bitmaps at the low screen sizes. Tweaked them so we knew what the exact screen small sizes looked like. Then when the outlines are made they have to be similar to the bitmaps and the hinting is easier since you know what the specific low sizes should look like."

From:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/trebuche/default.htm

hhp

Sorry, John. I was just talking about fonts meant to used in printed comic books. But you've got a really good point, especially since a lot of comics are being done for the web now.

Back in 1995-1996, I ran a web site devoted to all things GX. It was known as the QuickDraw GX Fan Club and it catalogued things like applications, printer drivers and fonts that worked with QuickDraw GX. As well, it created a whole community of users and developers of this revolutionary technology.

A technology that was a little too revolutionary for companies other than Apple. In addition to a powerful new printing architecture, and a totally revamped graphics architecture (transparency, etc), it also promised to bring high-end typographical freedom and control for free to those applications that were revised. This was obviously problematic for Quark and Adobe, which only ever really paid lip service to the concept. The other problem was that in order to make the most of GX, you needed revised applications, revised printer drivers, and revised fonts (though it could leverage Adobe MM features). The problem of chicken-before-the-egg cubed (ie: to the power of 3).

Now in terms of fonts, there were a couple of them already, even before Tekton GX. Apple Chancery and Skia were the first Apple fonts. Jonathan Hoefler was contracted to do two other weights of Hoefler Text. All of these fonts included large sets of ligatures and alternatively styles. Skia of course had MM-like axes to play with the weights and width.

Some less well known but definitely among the coolest were developed as part of a runtime that Apple had contracted to promote GX. They were:

- Buffalo Gal by Thomas Rickner. This face includes a number of alternate faces.

- Jam by Erik van Blokland of LettError. Like Skia and MM faces, you could play with various axes. This one, a typewriter font, was even cooler. Using a slider, you could make the font heavier and smudge more (with requisite stray ink spots), almost to the point of being illegible.

- Chunk by Matthew Butterick of Periculum Type. A display font with an outer edge and an inner edge, and a white middle. You could vary the width of the outer and the inner.

- Lastly, Zycon by The Font Bureau. A series of animals including cats, dogs, etc. By playing with a slider, you could make the cats tail move, etc.

Now these fonts were pretty cool in print. But they were even cooler when animated. My experience starting the GX Fan Club got me a job at a company called PaceWorks in the Valley. They made a product called ObjectDancer, which was a mix of 2D animation and Adobe After Effects. Picture this: type following a path, while rotating and scaling (via bound box) while also having the individual weights (a la MM) being moved (weight, extended, condensed), all happening at the same time. Export the result out to QuickTime and you could whip the pants off of any titling application on the planet. And this was 1996. Sadly, Apple killed QuickDraw GX within a year of launching the product and the company had to move onto other things.

I actually still have copies of each of those fonts via an Apple Developer CD and treasure them early. Running Mac OS X now, I haven't had a chance to experiment much. They load via Suitcase 10, and should work fine in any application, particularly those that support ATSUI because the guy who did the type engine in GX, the wonderful Dave Opstad, was later reassigned to that project. In fact, the GX type engine forms a large part of the foundation for ATSUI as I understand it.

- ken
amateur type fan

Greetings Ken!

Wow, I remember checking your website every single week for GX news. GX vas the reason I switched from PCs to my first Mac! [Fractint was the reason I switched from Apple //'s to my first PC, but that's another story.]

I am presently experimenting with the AAT development tools. I believe Apple's answer-every-MS-Office-app-with-an-Apple-counterpart strategy may yield more interest in AAT-enabled fonts in the future. Especially when Apple comes out with an answer to MS Word.

Ken, very interesting info!

But really, Apple is just as weasely as any other corporation.

hhp

Hrant:

1. Define "wishy-washy" in concrete terms.
2. I don't see it as an "aesthetic failing." Perhaps I am some kind of Philistine or what have you. We simply disagree here.

The biggest problem people have with Comic Sans is not the design itself but the fact that hordes of non-designers, people who don't even know that you can buy more fonts, use it at ppems above 20. I have nothing against non-designers doing design. Often such things are done for the sake of expediency and lack of forethought.

Please come back and resume trashing Comic Sans when you finish designing some kind of technology to keep people from using the right fonts for the wrong purposes.

"Wishy-washy" is a highly technical typographic term that applies to a very rare group of fonts, ones that have stroke topologies that... SUCK! ;-)

Seriously, just look at that UC "R", man, come on. It's not the structure of the letters, it's not really that the font was built with strokes (I can't complain about that too much, since my own Akhalkalak is stroke-based), it's that the strokes are discontinuous. Disontinuity seems to be OK (or even desirable - look at Whitman) when the inside and outside edges are not "tied", but when you mix a chirographic foundation in there it just looks like a regurgitated pretzel. Interestingly, Connare's Magpie also has a certain naive quality, but it's not dumb - it works to great effect.

But anyway, I wouldn't call you a Philistine, not least because you like Patria. :-) The fact that you also like Comic Sans makes me either very worried or very confused, I'm not sure.

> .... use it at ppems above 20.

Again: A font that's hinted as superbly as Comic Sans does not need to have such dumb outlines. You can have both, and you do.

> some kind of technology to ....

You can blame users for a lot of things, but not what I'm seeing as the inherent design failing of CS. That's there even if nobody ever set a word in it.

--

BTW, have you guys noticed the Euro in CS?!
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/microsoft/comic-sans/ms/character/20AC/CP2/
I really don't know what to think about that.

hhp

As the kids say, OMGLOL.

It. Has. An. Eye.

Is the euro more serpentine than the dollar or the pound?

Ay Carramba!

(excuse the pun)

Paul

Comic book lettering was mostly just servicable. Incompetence was rare and always very jarring.

One publisher, used a leroy lettering kit (I think that was what it was called) and 'cleverly' credit their lettering to one A. Machine.

A few of the old letters had great talent. Even as a kid I learned to recornize DC's Gaspar Saladino because his captions were so attractive. Possibly Alex Toth was the only major artist I remember being an exceptional letterer as well.

The GX package was a failure because it shipped during the period when the wheels really started to come off the Apple OS strategy .... there was declining credibility with developers, who didn't want more technology for solving problems that their customers didn't have.

TrueType GX was contemporaneous with Newton, OpenDoc, Rhapsody, Copland, etc --- all losers.

I spent most of '93 working with Matthew Carter on the core fonts for the Taligent OS, which were an enormous sans & serif GX family. I drew & hinted THOUSANDS of characters .... after that project died I kinda lost my taste for type design!!

Hmm, Hrant, I don't think John "likes" patria as we "dislike" it. He just consider how it works in text sizes on screen, the reason for which it was designed.

But John, I am really unable to understand: Comic Sans is the quintessence of all ungraceful: how could these forms lend themselves more to sophisticated TT hinting and not, say, the ones of a monoline version of something good like WildWords Plus from Comicraft?
Or, if you need U&Lc faces, the great lettering fonts you used to find for free from the Dogstar guys?

In my ignorance, I thought more regularity allowed for easier hinting. Comic Sans is a mess, any way you look at it. So I could appreciate the great work the hinter did, but not at all who designed it.
But who designed it, actually. Are we not sure it's some malevolent supernatural entity? :)

For Richard Evans Lee:
Well, if you look outside the US as well, there's been plenty of great comic artists doing GREAT comic book lettering.
Many of the letterers which used to work on the french Disney publication "Le Journal de Mickey" were great. In italy we have a great letterer which works for Disney (mostly on "Zio Paperone", which translated all the Barks stories for new audiences) and when they digitized his handlettering you hardly noticed the difference, because he was painstakingly accurate.
Jacobs and Hergé lettering was good, in France they have a long tradition of U&Lc lettering, and it's very pleasing and different from the all uppercase.
Well, in Germany they used a lot typographic lettering and Helvetica but I'm not sure they do it anymore.
Besides, there used to be really many great letterers in American Comic Books as well, from the 1950s up to the Digital.

"Hmm, Hrant, I don’t think John “likes” patria"

Now you'll kill me. I wrote Patria instead of Comic Sans. But don't worry: I never liked Freud, so it's not a freudian lapsus, because such things does not exist in me.

> such things does not exist in me.

Claudio finally admits to being a cyborg. ;-)

hhp