Hey, Nando v Movies and a fantastic group of youtubers have come together to celebrate
Marvel’s X-men, in a project called one excellent scene.
Today I want to break down one particular feature from the new “Dawn of X” comics
that caught my eye as a lettering designer: the Krakoan alphabet.
It’s a fantastic piece of world building and I think it will be interesting to look
closer at exactly how it works as a piece of design.
[Music] The Krakoan writing system is introduced in issue 1 of the House of X series.
I’m not going to discuss any major plot points, so there won’t be any spoilers.
In-comic we know that this is a mutant language beyond human comprehension.
All mutants have it psychically implanted upon arrival to the living island of Krakoa,
which has become an independent nation for all of mutant kind.
In reality Krakoan is not a language, but a cipher: a code which translates directly
back into – in this case – English.
Each letter of our alphabet has a symbol along with c-h, s-t and t-h.
Krakoan is not a constructed language aka conlang but a constructed script.
Lindsay Ellis has a great video about conlangs in fiction if you’re interested in that
topic.
Constructed scripts or neographs are also used in fiction with and without a matching
conlang.
For example, Klingon is a conlang with its own constructed script.
Whereas alien languages in Futurama are usually just a cipher for hiding nerdy jokes.
The Dawn of X relaunch is headed by Jonathan Hickman and he’s used constructed scripts
in previous comics.
2016’s The Black Monday Murders and his 2013 run on Avengers both used symbolic ciphers
but the Krakoan alphabet is by far his most ambitious.
Unlike a fictional script like Elvish from Lord of the Rings which takes clear inspiration
from real life calligraphy, Krakoan’s goal is to look unlike any language made by humans.
Each symbol in Krakoan is constructed within a 3x5 grid with squares, lines and circular
elements possible within different areas.
Aesthetically these characters have a lot more in common with braille dots, eastern
trigrams and western geomantic figures than any written languages.
Geomancy is an ancient form of divination which, translated from Greek, means literally
“foresight by earth”.
Similar to reading tea leaves, geomancy is the interpretation of markings in the earth
or patterns formed by throwing handfuls of soil rocks or sand.
This perfectly fits the language’s origin in-comic.
Krakoan is supposed to be a transcription of the language of the sentient, living island
of Krakoa as interpreted by the mutant hyperlinguist Cypher.
If we compare it with real language scripts there are some similarities and a few key
differences that give away Krakoan’s constructed origin.
It seems to lack numerals or punctuation, aside from what has been interpreted to be
brackets.
Like Chinese and Japanese characters, each glyph is the same width so there’s no need
for kerning, which is needed for alphabets like Latin or Cyrillic when particular pairs
of letters create inconsistent spacing.
Similar to English, Krakoan reads from left to right only.
Which is a bit of a shame because only a handful of characters stick out, in terms of inconsistent
height, otherwise it would also have been possible to orient vertically like Chinese,
Japanese and Korean.
Similar to these East Asian languages though, there is no upper or lower case.
However, one thing stands out as Krakoan’s “tell” as a constructed script.
Real languages change over time.
They adapt in a process similar to natural selection.
A real system of writing needs to optimize for both speed of writing and legibility.
There are a few special cases where one is clearly dominant over the other, for example
- shorthand works by being fast to write, but is harder to read than longhand.
But generally all systems of writing try to balance these two competing needs.
Almost all our current writing systems predate the printing press and usually began by making
marks with a handheld stylus like a pen.
Features that slowed down the writing process became simplified.
Letter forms that were easy to confuse with others became more distinct or were dropped.
This meant that letter forms slowly changed and adapted over centuries into more streamlined,
“user tested” forms before the designs were fixed into their final typographic version.
For example in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, a fairly recently invented system of writing
early, versions used a mix of both short strokes and dots.
Over time these merged into one approach: the short stroke.
Modern Hangul no longer uses the dot element, as it was quicker to write this way by hand
and equally as legible as before.
Krakoan has several features which work only with the crisp detail that is possible in
type.
In this panel from 2020 Wolverine, issue 1 we see some Krakoan symbols that were hand
drawn and it can be difficult to tell the small squares from the small circles.
For legibility, simpler is better.
If we ignore the difference between the dots and squares, the alphabet still works.
Each character is as distinct from the others as before, so it’s unnecessary.
This design detail, for a real, living language, would most likely be dropped over time.
Now in-comic there just may never be an occasion for a character to write the Krakoan alphabet
with a pen.
Perhaps there just are no birthday cards in Krakoa?
But personally, I think even a fictional system of writing feels incomplete without a handwritten
form.
After all, as Magneto says: of course the mutants need a language of their own.
One cannot create a distinct culture without it.
Unfortunately at this point things are kind of in a reverse order.
Type should follow handwriting, not the other way around.
Attempting to reverse engineer a way to write Krakoan is a pretty frustrating experience.
This recording for example is on my fourth attempt.
Things like the dot shapes and the half crescent details just don’t want to be drawn by hand.
So as things stand, even though every mutant in the galaxy may understand Krakoan, if they
had to leave a post-it note in the communal kitchen – I think they’d just revert back
to a human language.
Regardless of its strengths and weaknesses as a fictional language, Krakoan has a second
more important purpose: to visually tie together the shared universe of the X-men across comic
book titles.
It does this as more of an illustration than a typeface and as a piece of graphic branding.
Especially for the pages in between panels which give exposition and commentary, the
use of Krakoan is often what sets the visual tone in what otherwise would be a stark page
of text.
Through this branding it manages to tie together over a dozen ongoing titles within the shared
universe written and drawn by a huge range of different writers and artists with diverse
characters styles and tone.
It does a lot of the work of creating the futuristic sci-fi aesthetic of the Dawn of
X era.
Part of what makes that work is Krakoan’s clear allusion to the sci-fi trope of the
glowing hula hoop UI.
For over three decades we’ve seen hundreds of variations on the holographic user interface
of the future, designed around concentric rings.
Functionally it’s complete nonsense, but it immediately evokes the idea of sci-fi and
future tech.
Just because it’s a trope, doesn’t mean it’s lazy work, I think that the mix of
influence from the sci-fi and the geomantic symbols is a really clever remix here and
as a decorative brand asset for this era of x-men stories, Krakoan is a fantastic piece
of design.
So what do you think?
What does Krakoan evoke for you?
Are you interested in seeing more future videos on other constructed scripts?
Simlish from the Sims, perhaps?
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It really makes a huge difference to a small channel like mine.
My name is Linus, I’ve said the word Krakoan about 900 times (Krakoa?
Krakoan.
Krakoan?)
Thank you for your time and I hope I’ll see you in a future video.