Comic Serif, comic relief
It had to come to this at some point.
It’s an obvious joke, I admit that upfront. But it makes me laugh every now and then, and that’s why I share it. I love messing around with existing type. I have a “hacked” Quadraat that adds common misspellings to your otherwise flawless typing (through OpenType magic). I have a very thin version of Arnold Boecklin that looks as much like a joke as it sounds. I’m no stranger to breaking the font licence, clearly.
But Comic Serif here, that’s different. Comic Sans has become such a hated cliché in the design world and outside of it. It’s the obvious victim of mockery in type. I hope this sheds a different light on the original, much-maligned sans. I added serifs to the original skeleton, and only adjusted the a and g and added a contextual alternate to imbue it with some type legacy.
Four details in comparison: the two-storey g and a, serifs on all caps and extensive “serifing” on the lowercase characters.
Download and legal details
Here is the font file, a zipped-up OpenType .ttf, hopefully compatible with your Microsoft Office and Adobe CS packages. Regarding licensing, I realise this is probably far out of the grey area and well into illegal, but let’s consider it a remix. Use it freely and go nuts. Just don’t sell it. If you make something with it, e-mail me; I’d love for people to do something fun with it. It’s been lying on my dusty shelves for so long.
I’ll close with words by Vince Connare, the original designer, when interviewed about the popular disdain for his most famous creation:
“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”