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It is not modeled on children’s handwriting but, as the name implies, letters found in speech bubbles in comic books.


If you look at the font, it's quite clearly extremely "irregular" in a way that children's handwriting is, and comic book speech bubbles very much are not meant to be.

Indeed, the creator used some comics as a starting point, but then tried to redraw the strokes with a mouse (!), and intentionally drew them wrong, not keeping them straight, etc.

So the goal was not to reproduce comic speech bubbles at all, but to create something instead "strange and childlike". You would never want to use it for actual comic book lettering.

From an interview [1]:

> They wanted all kinds of fonts – a lot of them strange and childlike. One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children. I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense.

> So I had an idea to make a comic-style text and started looking at Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, graphic novels where the hand lettering was like a typeface... Instead, I looked at various letters and tried to mimic them on screen. There were no sketches or studies – it was just me drawing with a mouse, deleting whatever was wrong.

> I didn’t have to make straight lines, I didn’t have to make things look right, and that’s what I found fun. I was breaking the typography rules. My boss Robert Norton, whose mother Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, said the “p” and “q” should mirror each other perfectly. I said: “No, it’s supposed to be wrong!”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/28/how-we-...


Also, "real" comic book fonts do exist: https://www.comicbookfonts.com/


Except speech bubbles in comic books look a lot better and more regular.




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