Comic Sans is a fun typeface that embodies the spirit of informality. It looks hand-lettered, with a felt-tip pen. Comic Sans is familiar, used widely all over the world for correspondence, flyers, birthday cards, and labels that are meant to look handmade. It is surprisingly readable in text, whether in print or onscreen. Its imperfect, irregular shapes make it inappropriate for formal documents, although it has often been used in unexpected ways.
As its name suggests, Comic Sans looks like the lettering in a comic book. It was created in 1994 by type designer Vincent Connare for a specific purpose: for speech balloons for characters in an animation application. It was included in the Windows 95 Plus! add-on as well as Internet Explorer, and became wildly popular (as well as much reviled by those who dislike its playful sloppiness). Comic Sans came originally in two weights, Regular and Bold; later, true italics were added for each.