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	bancomicsans.com A site dedicated, more or less seriously, to halting the public use of the font Comic Sans. I'm not so much reviewing the site itself as the concept of hating a font so much that you devote a website to its eventual destruction. The creators of this site are earnest as hell even as they joke; They have a manifesto, which as a form I always like because a it aspires to a rare directness, completeness, and (one hopes) honesty about its subject, even if the execution often falls short of the ideal; I'm just glad someone was game enough to give it a try. bancomicsans's manifesto is great: totally pompous and grandiose -- at one point literally calling for a revolution of the proletariat to aid in the cause -- because its writers know too much than to take themselves completely seriously. The ironic dance of "I'm kidding... no I'm not... just kidding... or am I?" may at first seem kinda childish or intellectually immature, but sometimes it's the only way for a serious intellectual to behave. (And to digress for a moment, the same thing happens in New York fashion all the time, this weird Schrödinger's Cat-dance of: "is that guy for real with that mustache, or is it ironic?") Who would take somebody seriously who really took this "Ban Comic Sans" crap seriously? Their ironic distance makes following their lead possible. (Hmm. I'm beginning to wonder how old this phenomenon really is. We tend to give our ancestors less credit for cleverness than they maybe deserve. Don't all movements start out as a bunch of drunken friends advancing a thought experiment, having fun, going along with the gag, daring each other into more blasphemous or extreme statements, until somebody whips out a pen, checks the spelling and grammar, and hammers it to the cathedral door, ruining the fun for everyone?) Anyway, read the site. Part of the case against Comic Sans is that it is fucking everywhere. If you walk two minutes in a densely populated commercial area of a major US city and you won't have to wait three minutes before spotting as many egregious applications of Comic Sans on handbills, posters, even professional signage. The fucking sugar packets in my local diner say "Sugar" in Comic Sans. This wouldn't be so bad if, like two of Microsoft's default fonts, Arial (a sloppy copy of Helvetica) and whatever they're calling their variation on Times Roman, it was fairly plain, and therefore almost invisible in most contexts (nobody says "nice use of Arial, dude"). Comic sans is a badly made comic book word balloon font -- in the wrong context (i.e. not a comic book word balloon) it stands out and stabs you in the eye with its inappropriateness. Anyway, I'm just recapitulating their arguments in less coherent and less complete form. Read the site. Live the message.
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	4/09/2006 • link •

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Oy vey.

I never admitted this to you before, because I couldn't take the heat of your disdain, but back in college, I used Comic Sans a couple of times for headlines in the A&E section of the schoolpaper that I edited and designed pages for.

Mostly for comic book reviews or comic book movie reviews, so it's semi appropriate. But I think that probably only makes me move a couple of places back in line--no longer first against the wall when the revolution comes, but maybe 8th? 9th?; 4/10/2006 10:39 AM
Anonymous said...: Times New Roman is the only way to write. Everything is only a feeble mockery of its solidity and beauty. I love Times New Roman and I'm not afraid to admit it. Does that make me gay?; 4/11/2006 11:04 PM