What did Comic Sans ever do to us? The font was one of the typefaces preloaded onto Windows 95—where it stuck out like a sore thumb alongside more stately options like Arial and Times New Roman—and as its thick preschool curves metastasized across the web, the world enshrined it as the sworn enemy of taste. No font in the history of the written word (except maybe Papyrus) has ever inspired such ire. Online gift shops stock anti–Comic Sans shirts and coffee mugs, a free Chrome extension called the “Comic Sans Replacer” automatically purges its lettering from the internet, and as the New York Times reported in 2019, at least one couple has found love in their shared animus toward the typeface.
Historically, much of the hostility has focused on Comic Sans’ tendency to pop up in inopportune places. When Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, excoriated LeBron James, that letter was written in Comic Sans. When a World War II memorial was unveiled in the Netherlands? That was also written in Comic Sans. Typography is an art form that aims to fade into the background of daily life, and yet somehow there’s one font we’ve learned to hate above all others. Simon Garfield, author of Comic Sans: The Biography of a Typeface—the first in his series of books about fonts—wants to know why.
Garfield’s new book tracks the history of Comic Sans, from its kitschy speech-bubble origins to design-school anathema, and along the way, he outlines the tremendous impact the font has had on typography’s cultural visibility. Quibble with its gaucheness all you want, but a huge number of people have formed an opinion about Comic Sans, in the same way someone might form an opinion about art. (There’s also some evidence the font assists with dyslexia? Who knew!) That alone is a victory for anyone who cares about the shape of letters. Garfield and I spoke about that, the mercurial tastes of the type community, and the ways the font is currently being reclaimed by postironic memers. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: Who, for the love of God, invented Comic Sans—and more importantly, why?
Simon Garfield: It was never intended to be a typeface. Vincent Connare was working as a typographic engineer at Microsoft in 1994. [Fun fact: If you Google Connare’s name, or that of his infamous font creation, the search results are returned in Comic Sans.] He was trying to make old typefaces work on a computer. Now, if you wanted to digitize a traditional typeface that was still in copyright, you had to pay a lot of money, because things look very different on-screen than they do in print. And then you also had to pay the copyright owners and the font factory that owned it. So Microsoft thought, Well, hang on a minute. We can try and do this as cheaply as we can by sort of inventing our own. Hence, they didn’t pay for Helvetica. They made Arial instead.
The story with Comic Sans is that Connare saw this early version of Microsoft Bob, which was a piece of software that worked like an on-ramp onto computers for people who were new to them. It would guide you around by the old point-and-click with the mouse, and you would be introduced to things you could do on a computer. But the typeface in Microsoft Bob was in Times New Roman, which was very old and boring. And so he thought, I can improve on this. So, he drew, by hand, letters that were sort of inspired by comic books and other things that he loved, with an old sort of calligraphic method. Microsoft thought, We have these new letters now, which look like something a child might have invented, and they loaded them in.
So Comic Sans was almost an afterthought.
Basically! There were very, very few other typefaces that you could have on your pull-down menu on Windows 95. Times New Roman was one; Arial was one; Courier New, I think it was called, was the other. Those were the key ones, really. So they thought, Well, let’s throw in a wild card. And then people thought, Hey, this is the typeface for me. This is kind of friendly. These are letters I can understand. It took people back to something they were comfortable with in school, and I don’t think anyone could’ve expected that. It’s now been used in millions of digital communications, emails, and websites.
Did people hate fonts before Comic Sans? Or is that dynamic exclusive to this particular typeface?
I think it’s certainly the one that kind of caused the most uproar. The type community, like any small community, is a hotbed of debate, argument, pleasure, and displeasure. I imagine when Helvetica launched, people must have thought, Oh, no. This doesn’t work. It’s too cold, and it’s too Swiss. But the reason that Comic Sans sort of caused all the furor was because of a perfect storm. It was bundled with Windows 95, which meant that people had access to it in a way they hadn’t before. And then people could get on the internet and weigh in, through email groups and listservs (and then, later on, with social media and Facebook). If Comic Sans had, for some reason, emerged 20 years earlier, we wouldn’t have had the digital facilities to express love or hate for it.
Is there an argument that Comic Sans opened the door for the huge number of wacky or unique fonts we find in our word processors now? Did Comic Sans walk so Papyrus could run?
It probably opened the door for those. If you go to one of the font foundries online and you search for Comic Sans, you will get a hundred variations of it—some of which you’ll like a lot more, some less, and some which were probably done in half an hour. But all of those fonts were seen to have a purpose. So Papyrus was intended to be a rather ancient-looking typeface that maybe you’d want in your Greek restaurant or something. What people realized early on, and this is the whole reason Comic Sans took off, is that a paragraph looks different depending on what font you put it in: serious or funny or whatever. You should be grateful to Comic Sans. The one great thing that it did is it introduced people to the debate about typefaces. In a twisted way, Comic Sans contributed to the growth of fonts in general.
Was there a flash-point moment when people started hating Comic Sans?
Originally, I think, it came from misuse of the font. If you were reading a book called The Guide to Bowel Cancer and it was all printed in Comic Sans, you would say, “Well, that’s not quite right.” When you get a lawyer’s letter in Comic Sans, you think, Who have I employed here? There is also a story that’s been told many times about Dave and Holly Combs, who started a website called bancomicsans.com. [Editor’s note: The site hit the internet in 2002, complete with T-shirts and stickers for sale.] But they knew that it was all in good fun and not a political movement. I have seen it in hospital waiting rooms—not that this was necessarily bad, but it certainly was quite far from its original intended use. There are photos of it appearing on the sides of ambulances, in Spain I think, which I do consider inappropriate. I would personally love to see the font on the gravestone of a famous clown.
Did Connare ever receive any blowback or harassment for being the guy who invented Comic Sans?
I think he viewed it all with a degree of bemusement. He certainly doesn’t talk about being upset by the commotion. People dissed Comic Sans being misused, not its existence, so he could hardly be responsible for the way people used a typeface when it was out there.
It’s funny how dated some of that stuff sounds now. The hatred of Comic Sans was a real remnant of the early internet. And these days, I almost think Comic Sans has become sort of … cool? Or retro? Or, at the least, redeemed through irony.
I’m not going to name who this person is, but I have a friend who is now on the board of a big company, and she looks after a lot of famous names in the entertainment business. She writes in Comic Sans. Earlier today I was by the Rialto Fish Market and just by the Grand Canal, and there was a sign saying, essentially, that Venice isn’t just gondolas and transport for people. That was written in Comic Sans. The other side of the sign was this grand palazzo. I think that is interesting. Comic Sans has become normalized. I argue in the book that, well, maybe now it’s the coolest font to use with no shame, despite its reputation. Face magazine—which, when I was 20, was the coolest thing you could buy in print—last year printed a whole issue in what they called Comic Face, which was basically just Comic Sans with a few tweaks. I think everything has come full circle.
In some ways, that makes Comic Sans a survivor.
In the book, I recall a story Vincent Connare told me. He was at a dinner party in France, and he sat next to a person and they asked him what he did for a living. He mentions that he used to work at Microsoft, and the conversation dies out. It’s a bit boring. But when he says that he designed Comic Sans, everyone says, “That’s amazing!” Comic Sans is now 30 years old as we speak, and it will continue to be around. You can ban it as much as you want. It’s not going anywhere. And that’s interesting, because most typefaces don’t last. They really don’t. As we speak, there are a thousand graphic-design students scratching out what may be a great new typeface that we will never, ever see. And so you have to ask, Well, why do some survive? It’s that old idea that if you live long enough, anything will become cool, be that vinyl records or Comic Sans.
