Aug 27 2010
Best Free Comic Book Fonts: All-Caps Body
Most comic books and graphic novels letter the body text (dialogue and narration) in all-caps. Here are some of the best all-caps free fonts. If you’d like to download any of the fonts, please see the links below.
Free download links:
Eventually, I’ll be collecting lists of texts for:
–Body (standard capitalization)
–Titles
–Handwriting
–Horror
–Sci-Fi
–Sound Effects
–Fantasy & Runes
–Military/Stencils
–Whimsical
If you think of anything else, please let me know.
Those are some nice fonts.
However, I do want to know why so many people hate Comic Sans (truth be told, I was never a big fan of it myself…)
I have some theories.
–It looks childish, which makes it a poor fit for most comic books. Microsoft originally designed Comic Sans for the most childish of uses, a talking dog named Rover (sort of like Clippy). But most comic book readers are guys aged 15-30.
–The font is heavily overused in submissions because it’s the only font that comes installed on a PC with “Comic” in the title. Using it indicates that the author’s lettering choices are limited to what Microsoft put in front of him, which suggests he’s an amateur. (I can’t think of any comic books that are lettered in a pre-installed font).
–The font is only called “Comic Sans” because Microsoft thought it was appropriate for comics, not because comic book companies did.
–The font is not very space-efficient. In addition, I feel it’s hard to read at small sizes.
–It handles all-caps very poorly.
–There isn’t enough difference between Comic Sans bolded and Comic Sans regular.
I like Kid Cobalt and SF Toontime the best. I’d use them for Adrian and other human character. I’d use something like Mistral for Afflictus’ voice.
Also, because it comes pre-installed in MS Office, it is way overused in interoffice memos and flyers. Where it should never, ever be seen.
Out of curiosity… is there a reason that the sentence to show the font has been changed from “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” ? Classically, that sentence is used for a reason, because it shows every letter in the alphabet once, and only once.
The reason I ask is that, a couple of these fonts I was interested in, until I actually went to download them and realized that specifically the Q and the K didn’t really fit in with the style I am looking for, but they weren’t displayed in the example sentence. I realize that this was easily remedied as soon as I actually looked closer at the font, but… Anyway. Whatever. Just figured I’d point it out.
… I wouldn’t recommend rejecting a font because the Q and the K are off (unless maybe it’s a title font).