Thanks to the blog of Brian Fies, creator of the spectacular “Mom’s Cancer” —
ok wait, I have to interrupt my own blog post to ask, “Why can’t I format fonts or imbed links in Blogger on a Mac?” Book titles should be underlined and I want to hyperlink to Amazon so you can see the awesome cover of this book. But for some reason, I can’t do that here. Frustrating. I’m fighting the urge to write a stupid sentence that names the year and ends with the word “people.” Back to my real post.
— http://momscancer.blogspot.com/, I found a website, he says there are several, on which I can turn my own handwriting into a font. For $9. This may seem like just a fun computer thing, but to a cartoonist, it’s a dream come true, for all the reasons Brian points out in his post on the subject. (IF I COULD, I WOULD LINK TO THAT POST HERE BUT I CAN’T. SO IF YOU CARE, GO TO GOOGLE BLOG SEARCH, PUT IN “BRIAN FIES FONTIFIER.” For my part, I promise to email Blogger about this.)
So to re-create his experiment with my font, here is a clip of painstakingly pencilled, inked, erased (overlightening the ink) re-inked, scanned, and Photoshopped text from my cartoon “Kid Science” – all of which took at least half an hour to complete:
And here is a sample, all caps, of the newly created “Comic Nurse” font:
I write in all caps because I think it’s more legible. With the fontification, this passage actually looks better in normal text:
I must say, I do think the handwritten sample appears to have more ooomph to it, but I don’t think that’s how this will translate when I try to use it in a cartoon. With spacing and boldness adjustment, I think the type can be pretty close – and ultimately more legible – than the real thing. I resist the urge to virtualize just about everything (especially bowling) but this really could save my cartooning entirely.
As my parents used to say to my constant annoyance, “We’ll see…”