Today is Comic Sansday

Perhaps it’s because I was grass-fed on Comic Sans, that once invasive species of typography, that I’ve grown to despise it. In the late 90s, it was overly proliferate within AOL chatrooms, chain mail and Angelfire homepages. We instant messaged in comic sans and lit up our text with every illegible chroma. Needless to say, I was 14 years old and sound judgment was not yet a virtue.

And still, I remember my confusion when, years later, my best friend changed his default text to Veranda. We were still teens, but the Comic Sans bandwagon had reached its peak and suffered from mass mutiny. The world, it seemed, was sick of fun-loving, fantastic fonts.

The problem was the way in which the text was habitually misused, often chosen to convey serious messages when the font could hardly be taken seriously itself. Warning signs and passive-aggressive notes written in Comic Sans served as ignorant juxtapositions. I spent the last four semesters learning German out of a workbook entirely decked out in CS and it was the silent joke of the department. I couldn’t look at a list of verb conjugations without feeling like my second-language learning abilities were being shamelessly humored.

But while Comic Sans remains the font we all love to hate, it’s important to acknowledge that, like any typeface, it was created for a particular purpose. Back in 1994, font designer, Vincent Connare, was commissioned to develop a child-like type suitable for software called Microsoft Bob. Comic Sans was not meant to exist outside this domain, but the font wasn’t completed in time for the release of the product and so it was instead included in the Windows 95 Plus! Pack. The rest, as they say, is terrible, terrible typographical history.

However, it wasn’t until recently that I was right there with the Helvetica fans, too pretentious with my text to advocate for the laughingstock of font. But when I reached out to the people around me, I realized that my antagonism was sorely displaced. I interviewed a handful of students nearly 10 years my junior, only to find that they had hardly an opinion on Comic Sans at all. Have we spent the last decade so passionately trampling out Comic Sans only for the next generation to adopt a passive apathy over our cause?

And so I took to the Internet, interested to see how the Comic Sans bell curve was taking shape. What I found was a font pushing back from the obstructions of mockery and loathing, a zombie typeface with a renewed, albeit abused, vigor. There’s a Tumblr dedicated to revamping old corporate logos into its Comic Sans counterparts and an impassioned monologue of anger from the typeface itself.

But there’s no better way to convey the undeniable Comic Sans upswing than through the latest and catchiest pro-CS movement from YouTube user, Gunnarolla’s, most recent creation: The Comic Sans Song. 

So lets shelve our Trebuchet for a day and pay homage to the most resilient of fonts. Comic Sans, you horrendous Beanie Baby, amateur typeface: today I pay homage to you.