For many years I’ve taken advantage of web fonts to help make ComicsPundit a unique experience.

Long before TypeKit or other similar services came around to allow individuals to tap into their servers to host webfonts, I sought to host fonts on my own server.

But one cannot legally take a font off your desktop computer and embed it online. The font designers have rights, and that means paying for web font licenses, or at the minimum asking for permission.

Ten years ago very first font I hosted on this site was from Nate Piekos‘ company, Blambot Comic Fonts & Lettering. It was Mighty Zeo 2.0, it was a free font for desktop use, and I inquired if he’d permit me to use it on my website.

He graciously let me do so, upon the condition of having a prominent banner promoting Blambot, something I would have done out of gratitude even if he hadn’t asked.

Later, I discovered TypeKit, a subscription service that provided webfonts from their servers for a fee. It effectively licensed webfonts for the general public to use economically with minimal coding. When, sure enough Blambot was one of the providers of fonts on the site, i signed up.

However in recent years TypeKit was bought up by Adobe and intergrated into their Creative Cloud product. TypeKit plans by themselves are no longer sold. Previous customers continue to be grandfathered into their annual plans for now, but who knows for how long?

There are other web font services out there, with plenty of decent comics-related fonts available, including Blambot’s. And I was researching them when I discovered that Blambot now directly sold web font licenses for many of their fonts! Even better, the fonts provided even had clips of the CSS code required to use them!

Nate’s prior kindness has earned him my loyalty, which made me eager to cough up the cash for his fonts for the redesign of the blog.

Fifty dollars, a download, and upload later, nearly all of the text on ComicsPundit is rendered in fonts by Nate, served off of my WordPress server.

The comic lettering style text of the posts here are in the Silver Age font family.

Not many comic fonts come across as readable in a blog post as they do on a comics page. This is why I limited comic lettering fonts, mostly to headlines, and blockquoted text.

Silver Age Lower Case however, was good enough to make the main font of this blog.

The headlines and headers on this site use the Paperboy font family.

With a proper comic lettering font taking the heavy load of most of the text, I originally planned on a more serious font, maybe something evocative of newspaper headlines for the header tags. But then I saw the Paperboy font, and knew that it had to be the new headline font for the website. It evokes the concept of newspaper typography, but still fits side-by-side with more traditional comic lettering on the page.

The only place on the blog I don’t have web font on for at this time is in blockquote text. I’ve set standard serif fonts, like Times and Georgia, as the defaults there. But who knows, maybe I’ll buy another font if I think it’ll be a fit.

Currently, the primary logo for ComicsPundit is still the same one I made when I first rechristened my blog to that name, and I think still works. But if I ever try to replace it, I’ll noodle around and see if Paperboy and Silver Age could work in place of the current fonts.