I don’t know if I plan to see “V for Vendetta.” It seems fairly retarded, what with the strong-but-sensitive-dude who blows things up power-fantasy and the sexed-up fascist esthetic and what I expect will be plenty of Nietzsche-esque “will to power”-type speeches.

But I’m probably the wrong audience for it because I don’t read comic books; the first time I really heard about “V for Vendetta” was a couple months ago. What comics I did like as a kid—I was told by my friend Todd—were girl comics, so there you go. If you read this blog, you already know I have pretty faggy tastes. To say you don’t read comic books in the comedy world is sort of akin to saying you don’t have sex—kind of makes you a stand-out.

What I can appreciate, though, is the movie’s choice of typeface for the scary fascist poster:

It’s set in ITC Johnston and it looks great. The face is based on Edward Johnston’s 1916 design for the signage in the London Underground. It makes perfect sense for the movie because it’s British and it has a creepy no-nonsense quality to it.

Nearly all the sans serif faces designed in the early part of the 20th century are terrific. It was sort of the golden age of the sans serif before the Swiss with their damned Helvetica took over. Much of the look of these early faces must have been influenced by the simple monostroke sign-painter vernacular of the period (I’m not sure). More importantly, the Germans and their strict design principles and a general love of all things efficient and mechanical set the the tone.

This is the last sentence of this blog post.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 12:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized.