1

Silver Age Kryptonian Font: Reborn

Wednesday, August 21, 2013  |  Comments: 6

It's time for some nostalgia! I'm proud to announce that I have finally finished recreating the Silver- and Bronze-age Kryptonese font.

From the mid 1950s all the way through to Byrnes' reboot of Superman in 1986, Kryptonian speech was depicted in the comics with, for lack of a better description, a bunch of meaningless squiggly lines.

As a bit of a knee jerk response to fan mail questions regarding a Kryptonian alphabet, Superman editor E. Nelson Bridwell, perhaps unintentionally, canonized the fact that Kryptonese contained 118 letters (not that anyone knew what those letters were). Bridwell later took this pronouncement, and developed a 118-character alphabet based off of all the "squiggles" in the comics.

Later, Bridwell's papers and notes were passed on after his death to Al Turniansky. Turniansky created a simple bitmap font from Bridwell's script adding in symbols for numbers and punctuation. He then posted some images of this font on his website, but the font never materialized. After Turniansky passed away, it looked like it never would.

Now, using Turniansky's images, I have finally recreated the Bridwell Kryptonese script as a modern vector-based font. The alphabet itself is a bit on the absurd side, but it's still pretty fun to see this little bit of Superman history get a little bit of the life and appreciation that it never got during its heyday.

Head over to the Bridwell section of the site for all of Turniansky's published info on Kryptonese (not much), and also for more complete information on my new font—including a complete list of the character mappings.

If you just want to download the font, head over to the fonts page.

Comments (6)

  1. 张:
    Aug 25, 2013 at 12:46 AM

    This is a welcome End-of-Summer treat! Thanks for coming up with it and putting it online. It's a great link to the Superman mythos of yesteryear.

    Reply

    1. Darren Doyle:
      Aug 25, 2013 at 10:14 PM

      Thanks and You're Welcome! I thought it was fun!

      Reply

  2. Mr. X:
    Dec 10, 2013 at 03:55 PM

    Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!!!!!!!!:0

    Reply

  3. Gustavo Reis:
    Feb 15, 2014 at 11:08 PM

    Ehrosh :bem Doyle!

    I love your page. I became fan of Kryptonian language. I love languages. I'm translator.

    But I would like to study offline Krypton dictionary, language and grammar. Do you have something for us?

    Only a little thing: There aren't word "science" and "sciences in the dictionary. Why. But I read the tips. I think science for knowledge, but for sciences, what?

    Nahkluv!

    Urvish Shahrrehth!

    Reply

  4. Michael Turniansky:
    Aug 30, 2016 at 11:39 PM

    (I posted to you privately, but I want the world to see this) Beautiful. My brother Al would be proud of your Truetype vs.

    Reply

    1. Darren Doyle:
      Aug 31, 2016 at 11:12 AM

      Thank you so much! It was a fun project to make! Glad your brother would have approved! :D

      Reply


Add a Comment





Allowed tags: <b><i><br><span><img><a>Add a new comment:


News Feed

Mar 09 2018  |  Comments: 6
Feb 07 2018  |  Comments: 10
Dec 04 2017  |  Comments: 4
Nov 12 2017  |  Comments: 5
Mar 14 2016  |  Comments: 7
Dec 18 2014  |  Comments: 0
Aug 21 2013  |  Comments: 6
Jul 29 2013  |  Comments: 1
Jul 21 2013  |  Comments: 5