I've never bought a font before. These seem crazy expensive. Is this kind of pricing normal?
I'd expect to pay maybe a dollar or two for a font; it really doesn't seem like it would provide enough value to be worth more than that.
I totally understand that it seems expensive especially if you haven't bought fonts before. Designers are more willing to pay for fonts since fonts are their tools and money maker, but most people do not make a money's worth out of font purchase. If you are in an environment where you think font choices can improve your productivity, I do recommend you consider buying one. To talk about our side, serious typeface design requires years of experience, and people who buy fonts are much smaller in number, compared to film and music, which is also why fonts seem pricy. Look at MyFonts and you will see Comic Code is actually on the cheaper side. There are sometimes good fonts made open source, but the principle that we need to get paid still applies; for those projects, it's just that they were paid by other companies like Mozilla and Google, not users.
Here is an open source option of monospaced Comic Sans, which seems to be a passion project rather than a paid one. It's a single weight with very small character count. I mean no harm to her project, but it does make a case for what you get for free vs money. https://github.com/shannpersand/comic-shanns