Comic Sans: A Watchmen comedy of errors?
Are you looking for somewhere to place your ill feelings towards this font? Then look for Vincent Connare.
He designed the font for Microsoft many moons ago, namely as something to be used in word bubbles by "Microsoft Bob." I'm not at all familiar with it either, it's ok. If you send this man hate mail, spam, or some ill-vibes, he may give it back to you. He provides an interesting back story on its creation and many of the ills it's poor use has created. He approaches the subject with humor and insight, which may confuse some of us in the design world who seethe over it's use.
In the presentation on his site, he goes through then history of MS, the intended use, and some of the "amazing work" people have created with it. He also references his inspirations behind the hand of Comic Sans. He references two beloved DC comics book; The Dark Knight Returns & The Watchmen. The Dark Knight Returns was lettered by John Costanza and The Watchmen was lettered and drawn by Dave Gibbons. Both comics were published originally in and around 1986. It fits the time lime for Comic Sans creation with and the tale that Connare shares.
"Comics use primarily uppercase letters. I found the DC Comic ‘Watchmen’ more consistent and it seemed appropriate for the job. I looked at the best versions of the various forms of the letters. And began manually drawing the letters on the computer with Macromedia Fontographer. I drew the letters over and over until I had a good letter that captured the feel of the hand drawn letters in the comic."
-Vincent Connare
I find great irony in the fact that Comic Sans was created out of two of the most acclaimed comics of the last 30 years. I would definitely check out the slides(about half way down then page under the photo above), there are some great tidbits in there.
