Mainly more referring to https://github.com/shannpersand/comic-shanns, but the capital forms seem to very quickly leave a blocky feel, e.g. IT visually combining, NE visually combining. I do wonder if it would be possible to systematically adjust the kerning, la using openCV or similar to detect such things.
Oh wow, they really cleaned that one up since I last tried it ages ago! (some of the characters used to be so wonky I just couldn't get over it) Looks really nice now
Looks like "comic sans-inspired" is a genre. We also have Comic Shans, for example:
So this is just Comic Shanns (https://github.com/shannpersand/comic-shanns) with a couple of tweaks and a name change?
See also: Comic Shanns
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