Silver Age Kryptonian Font: Reborn

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.