Comic book and cartoon lettering fonts
Hand-lettered comic dialogue faces, sound-effect capitals and bouncy cartoon titles for comics, kids' media and humorous graphics.
KA-POW!
Comic lettering is a craft with its own rules. For most of the twentieth century balloons were written by hand, usually with a round-nibbed technical pen, in upright capitals of even thickness, slightly squarish, with bold slanted letters for emphasis. Sound effects and titles were drawn separately in big, bouncing, heavily outlined shapes. Digital comic fonts descend from both.
That gives two families of typeface, and a project usually needs one of each. Dialogue fonts are monoline, unjoined and calm; they should be legible at small sizes and should not draw attention away from the artwork. Display fonts for titles and effects are fat, uneven and loud, with letters that tilt and jump. Animated-cartoon lettering adds a third flavor: rubbery, lopsided letters with soft corners.
If you are lettering an actual comic, look for a dialogue font with a full set of punctuation and, ideally, alternate letter shapes, since repeated identical letters look mechanical in a balloon. Outside comics, these fonts work wherever a light, humorous tone is wanted: children's party invitations, classroom posters, stickers, video overlays. Used for serious messages they undercut the content, so match the font to the tone.
-
Bangers
All-caps comic-book title lettering: heavy, tightly packed, forward-leaning letters in the manner of superhero covers.
-
Comic Neue
A tidy, regularized take on casual comic lettering, monoline with round ends, in three weights with italics.
-
Delius
Comic-book lettering drawn with a round marker, upright and unjoined.
-
Comic Relief
Neat felt-tip lettering in Regular and Bold, with metrics matched to a widely installed casual font, plus Cyrillic and Greek.
-
Acme
Compact letters with lively, uneven strokes, inspired by classic cartoons and comics.
-
Chango
Extremely fat, squat letters with a soft, cartoon-like body, based on lettering by a Mexican illustrator.
-
Chewy
Fat, soft-edged letters whose strokes end in round blobs and lean and bounce a little, for cartoon-style titles.
Samples load a basic Latin subset of each family. Every family here carries an open license; its page states the terms and offers the original files.
Questions about comic book and cartoon lettering fonts
Which font should I use inside speech balloons?
A monoline, unjoined comic-lettering face with clear capitals. Keep the heavy bouncing display faces for titles and sound effects.
Should comic dialogue be in capitals?
Traditionally yes, because hand-lettered capitals stayed legible when printed small. Mixed case is common now, especially for younger readers.
Can I publish and sell a comic lettered with these fonts?
Yes. Most are under the SIL Open Font License and two are under the Apache License 2.0. Both allow commercial publishing in print and digital form.