Webcomic Pet Peeves

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

Maybe I'm Paul McCartney of webcomics, I just haven't met John Lennon of webcomics yet.

Wait till you meet the Heater Mills of webcomics.

[Eve Z.]

Actual teenage shoujo manga crap that gets more attention than my comic does.

but who'd need a shoutbox full of comments like "wow!!! cool !!" " you rule!" " kawaiiiii <3"?

[VinnieD]

I'd like to add. The obligatory gay character. It seems every webcomic is adding one now.

[Eve Z.]

not mine.

[LooneyBinProduction]

If it's one thing that drives me nuts, it's Comic Sans. I hate Comic Sans. It's bland, boring, and has no character to it. I see a lot of people start webcomics in Comic Sans and it makes me want to get a newspaper and swat them until they change the font.

Another thing I hate is when different characters talk in different fonts. I can understand if you have a specific reason, like say an angelic voice part getting a different font, but please, just keep your font consistent for your speech bubbles. I hate trying to decipher what a character is saying because the font is so hard to read. Also: don't use different colors too. One color for your letters. Lime green on a white speech bubble is a pain to read. You may think red on black is a great idea for an evil character, but I can barely read it. I'm colorblind. If you have a deep red against a black, I can't read it.

In short, one font, one color, and not Comic Sans.

[Fishies]

See, I like Comic Sans. I know everyone hates it, yet no matter how much I look at it I don't understand why. (Then again I handwrite my text and that's another thing people tend to hate.)

[Bustertheclown]

See, I like Comic Sans. I know everyone hates it, yet no matter how much I look at it I don't understand why. (Then again I handwrite my text and that's another thing people tend to hate.)

People only hate hand-written stuff when it's done badly, like it's illegible, it messes with page design, or viewing/print size wasn't taken into account while lettering. For the record, your lettering is perfectly fine. I don't hate Comic Sans, either. I don't love it, and I wouldn't use it, given all of the other options, but seeing Comic Sans doesn't send me into fits of rage.

[Dr Neo Lao]

I also don't get the deep hatred some people have against Comic Sans. It's legible, it's available on most computers and there is no great "offensive" characteristic to it.

I wonder if the people who hate Comic Sans also hate Ariel or Times New Roman? They are default 'bland' (as LooneyBinProductions says) and they are used everywhere (specially internet sites) but I don't hear people saying "use a font with character on your site!" I guess I'm just not passionate enough about comics.

[Lunar]

I use comic Sans primarily because I find it's a font the suits the look of my art. I can under stand if your comic had a more realistic tone how it's bubbly appearance could be off-putting but for more cartoony looking work (again like mine) I really don't see what the big deal is.

[Mercury Hat]

Well the idea is that the lettering is as much a part of the art as the rest of the work, so the font should match it somewhat. All caps lettering like what you'd find in most mainstream comics has become the de facto standard, but you can still find loads of cases where a different lettering/font type is used for effect.

Now that I've started doing more hand lettering, I've found that pretty much all digital fonts don't work for my stuff. To me, though, that's like finding that soft shading or vectors doesn't work with my stuff.

As far as comic sans goes, to me it's just so common to the point where it's almost not a comic font anymore. Not exclusively, at any rate. In that regard I would compare it to times new roman or something in that I wouldn't use it to letter a comic as it's too common and strangely not comic-y enough. Also the fact that it has the banded/serif "I" or whatever you want to call it so it sticks out in the middle of words; though that's just aesthetic snobbery on my part :> .

[Dooky]

I'd never use Comic Sans. Not that I have anything against it, but it seems to provoke such extreme reactions in other people that it's not worth the heat it would generate. I can, to some extent, understand the frustration that it's used in far too many places where it's not appropriate. But on the other hand, a comic is one of the few places where a font like Comic Sans should be used.

(And this has suddenly got me thinking. Where would be the least appropriate place to use Comic Sans? Wedding invitations? A restraining order? An undertakers' sign? Hmm...)

Anyway, I use Blambot's Kid Kosmic. I think the vaguely Cyrillic-looking flattened 'A's are cute.

[McDuffies]

Well this topic was inevitable I guess.

I use Comic Sans for lettering comics for the magazine I draw for. The reason I use it is, I don't know any other comic font that supports cyrilic letters. I tried making one, but somehow failed.
While using it, it became more obvious why people don't like it: gaps are uneven, and you get strange constellations of letters when you try to type a word that has, say, "i" or "l" in it. However, cyrillic letters are just as uneven and strange themselves, so I comfort myself that it's less noticeable. Plus I use all caps, which I think suffers less from those problems than non-capped. And in any way, noone complained yet.

I think that use of Comic Sans betrays a comic as amateurish, somewhat. But it's certainly not something that would ruin the comic for me, not would nice font make a comic significantly better than it is.
The thing is, I don't actually think that lettering is as much an integral part of the comic as, say, speech baloons or frames or page layout is. I always thought that comics owe their universality to the fact that they're just one white-out and pen job from being translated into any language. You could spend life reading French westerns and never knowing that they aren't made in USA, because once they're translated into your language, nothing betrays the country of origin (unlike films where even the best dubbing job looks fake, or literature which is heavily reliant on specifics of original language).
Of course, lettering has to be good and legit and translation has to be good. But if someone decided to take my page and displace all the speech baloons or replace them with different-looking ones, I would consider that an attack on my artistic integrity. If someone erased lettering from my comic and replaced it with different font or different language, I wouldn't consider it an attack on my artistic integrity.

[Jekkal]

Comic Sans has been explored in depth, and the basic complaints come down to something on the level of:

• If we can tell what font you're using, it ruins the magic.
• Comic Sans has a lot of spacing issues with its lettering and so it's jarring to read.
• It's been used on every cutesy-poo website we can think of since Ty.com was seen as the apex of the internet, and so it has gained a reputation as a cutesy-poo, amateur font.
• It just ain't legible the way the average comic font should be. It's very 'tall' in comparison.

Blambot fonts are starting to suffer from overexposure as well, but that's from lack of experience in their use.

Every font can be used, but it takes skill to use it WELL. Comic Sans has been abused so much that it's almost impossible to use properly now.

However, I DO think lettering is as important as the rest of the comic. it's what we're STARING AT when we're trying to make sense of the story, for God's sake. If you don't think reading is important, then make a silent comic. The rest of us would like to read something that makes sense for the environment involved.

[McDuffies]

If you don't think reading is important, then make a silent comic.

Was this adressed at me? Did I say that reading is not important?
It's the meaning of the words that you've read that is most important (besides the art, of course), not how pretty the letters are. Best the letters can do is not to distract from their meaning.
Case in point that when you pay too much attention to fonts it can be just as irritating because it distracts and disrupts reading experience:

Another thing I hate is when different characters talk in different fonts. I can understand if you have a specific reason, like say an angelic voice part getting a different font, but please, just keep your font consistent for your speech bubbles. I hate trying to decipher what a character is saying because the font is so hard to read.

Incidentally, one serious question: you mention fints being used well as oposed to being abused... how exactly do you use a font well? And how do you use it badly? I may be ignorant, but asides from some obvious technical things, like readability, size, spacing from the baloon edge... I never saw much philosophy in computer-lettering (hand-lettering is another story).

[CaptainClaude]

knowing when the style of the font you're using is appropriate to the action displayed in the image. that's a biggy.

[Yeahduff]

Seriously, guys, use something other than Comic Sans.

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

It's better than TIme New Roman, though.

[Yeahduff]

In the realm of speech bubbles, and nowhere else, sure. But then a crayon is better for comic making than a rock.

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

Depends on who wields the rock.

[Yeahduff]

Fine, but the cartoonists that can effectively use rocks or crayons are few and far between. So spend another 15 minutes finding a decent font.