This feast of St Augustine, I have an opinion about Comic Sans. The opinion regards a pernicious lie, and the pernicious lie is this: Comic Sans is a bad font.

Comic Sans burst into the world in 1994. Since then it’s been used variously on Beanie Baby tags, major scientific announcements, cardiac defibrillators in Monaco... if it’s typeable, it's been typed in Comic Sans.

Its designer, Vincent Connare, began working on Comic Sans after opening up an early version of a Microsoft program that was designed to make computers more child-friendly. He was greeted by a cartoon dog called Rover.

Rover had a speech bubble, and the speech bubble was written in Times New Roman.

As though little Rover was chiselling his thoughts into the side of an obelisk.

This was a strange choice of font for a playful dog.

Within a week, Connare had created and submitted something more appropriate; basing his new font off the handwriting in the two comic books that he had in his office: “The Dark Night Returns” and “Watchmen”.

That's right: never-not-smiling Comic Sans was inspired by the two magazines that ushered in the Dark Age of Comic Books.

We digress.

People who know a thing or two about aesthetics do not like Comic Sans, because─and here is that lie again─Comic Sans is bad. And, to be fair, you can tell that Comic Sans was put together without much care:

• the unfortunate sag of the capital D

• the odd kinks in the legs of the lower-case n

• the way that almost all of the letters manage to look both angular and bloated

...but none of those problems merit the level of vitriol that has been directed at Comic Sans across its nearly 26 year history. Instead, almost every criticism levelled at Comic Sans concerns the inappropriate contexts in which it is used.

Here’s why that’s a problem: it isn’t (really) Comic Sans that’s at fault. It's all the people that keep misusing it.

Come with me to Augustine.

In Confessions, St Augustine asks the question “Where is evil then, and whence, and how crept it in hither?” It’s a persistent question for Augustine. He gives his answer seven chapters later:

“all which is corrupted is deprived of good”.

Augustine’s argument is that evil “is not any substance: for were it a substance, it should be good… Thou madest all things good, nor is there any substance at all, which Thou madest not”

God made everything good, so evil cannot exist on its own. Instead, evil can only ever come about through the deprivation of something good.

So where does evil come from? Chapter 13: “And I enquired what iniquity was, and found it to be no substance, but the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee, O God, the Supreme, towards these lower things”

You can’t point to evil and iniquity on a map, evil and iniquity are located in the choices and desires of the human will.

Us humans have a tendency to place the blame for our bad choices back onto the things we misuse. Augustine won’t let us do that.

Comic Sans is not a bad font: it’s a font that’s used badly, and that’s an important distinction.

Want to know how to use Comic Sans properly? It’s right there in its name.

Comic Sans.

Don’t use Comic Sans to deliver bad news; because it isn’t called Tragic Sans.

Don't carve it in stone, it's sans serif.

Use Comic Sans in comics.

And read more Augustine.