Storytelling by typography is something I wish I got to do more. There’s a project I’ve kicked around for over a decade called Tommy Sands, which would reimagine familiar typefaces as people. Unfortunately, my main idea for it was to turn Comic Sans, the world’s most widely (and not always justly) hated font, into Tommy Sands, a depressed and unappreciated clown whose brother was the ruthless, abusive executive Gil (alluding to the real-life Eric Gill, creator of Gill Sans, whose geometrically beautiful work should not outweigh his sexual atrocities, but pretty much does because only font nerds care about learning font creators’ personal lives). Art here is by Jeffrey Onwaluru, who worked on the version that came closest to fruition.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Yeah, even though I drafted all my versions of this well before 2019, today it just looks like a gimmicky Joker knockoff. Janice suspects that I ultimately never committed to it because I just don’t have it in me to be that depressing, and the most upbeat ending I could visualize for it would still entail a lot of darkness.

ANYWAY. At least we could get John to do this page with handwritten signatures, each of which captures something of its signer’s character. A lot of comics, even professionally created ones, try to substitute “handwriting fonts” for diegetic handwriting, and I always hate it.

So to answer the question I raised earlier, I feel like E-Merl and Scipio are kind of go-with-the-flow types who may not think Bandit’s perfect, but they are comfortable enough under her command that given a neutral, campaigning-free vote like this, they’ll go with what they know.