What Fonts did Viz use for the Sound Effects in the Original Manga?

Discussion regarding the entirety of the franchise in a general (meta) sense, including such aspects as: production, trends, merchandise, fan culture, and more.

Moderators: General Help, Kanzenshuu Staff

User avatar
Underscore_Johny
Newbie
Posts: 30
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:22 am
Location: Ireland

What Fonts did Viz use for the Sound Effects in the Original Manga?

Post by Underscore_Johny » Thu Sep 23, 2021 11:49 am

Hey all, I'm undertaking a personal project of mine to document the various fonts that Viz used when they translated the original manga (DB and DBZ, not DBS), and I've run into a few stumbling blocks. I was able to figure out a lot of the fonts that they used for the main text, which was mainly thanks to using sites like WhatTheFont, but in regards to the replacement sound effects artwork that they added in to replace the original Japanese ones I wasn't able to find any information about the types of lettering that they used.

I'm not that well informed about how exactly such translations are made so I do not know for a fact if they just used actual fonts, hand drawn lettering or both, which is kind of what I want to know. Some of the sound effects are clearly just fonts that I can't track down for some reason but there are others that confuse because though they appear to share the same style, the letters do not look exactly the same as each other. For example if you look at what I have uploaded here, the two 'N's are clearly the same style but if you look closely they differ slightly, if they were a single font they would look identical. That, or they were just able to bend the letters to look that way, I don't know.

Image

So essentially what I am trying to ask is, is it possible to track down the fonts that Viz used? Or were all of the lettering styles created specifically for their own use and therefore can't be documented? I thought that I would ask here since there are definitely people here that are more qualified than me to answer these questions and because I've looked just about everywhere for answers but to no avail. Thanks!
My YouTube channel (for all things related to Dragon Ball music): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8u5b- ... hh72ZLKsQ/