I’d bet, even without looking at other strips in the series, that it’s a font. The letters are very consistent.
I was looking at comic lettering the other day, and saw someone try to make a font based on Bill Watterson’s lettering in Calvin and Hobbes. One thing you immediately notice is that all of the individual letters look identical. You can make variable fonts these days, and I’d guess that there’s likely some technical route to create variation, but ordinarily, fonts don’t have that variation, and even someone who does a lot of lettering has a certain amount of natural variation from letter to letter.
I’d bet, even without looking at other strips in the series, that it’s a font. The letters are very consistent.
I was looking at comic lettering the other day, and saw someone try to make a font based on Bill Watterson’s lettering in Calvin and Hobbes. One thing you immediately notice is that all of the individual letters look identical. You can make variable fonts these days, and I’d guess that there’s likely some technical route to create variation, but ordinarily, fonts don’t have that variation, and even someone who does a lot of lettering has a certain amount of natural variation from letter to letter.