When I first met Jim Marcus I expected him to be an eight-foot tall androgyne with metallic skin and cloven hoofs who hovered six inches off the ground with a head cloaked in a halo of wasps. Instead I was greeted by a multi-pierced, barefoot guy named "Jimmy" who was shorter than me and looked like a panhandling gutterpunk I had passed on the Chicago sidewalk moments ago.

Something about the darkly sexy ethereal imagery Marcus creates as both designer and musician makes it hard for me to believe it's created by mortal hands. Marcus's art seems blessed with an angel's touch. Not some goofy cherubic little fat fleshy angelthing, but one of the badass angels with black leathery wings. Like Lucifer. Y'know Lucifer was an angel at one point, one of God's favorites supposedly. And I'm sure if that angel-in-exile Lucifer were to sit down in front of a Mac, he'd spawn gothic eye candy similar to the gifs, epses, interfaces, and fonts of Jim Marcus.

Marcus is a rockstar in both the music and the design world. As a designer, he's made dozens of beautiful fonts, which are available from the futuristic font distributor [T-26] in his hometown of Chicago. Historical, script, techno, or hand-drawn, Marcus creates fonts of every sort, each one more beautiful than the last. Among his type creations is Aquiline, [T-26]'s best selling typeface ever.

Musically, Marcus is best known for his work as a founding member of the industrial group Die Warzau. Currently Marcus devotes most of his recording time to a new band called Everplastic. Everplastic CDs are available from Thickface records, a new venture created to explore limited edition multimedia, CD-rom, and musical releases. You can find out more about Everplastic and Thickface at the [T-26] Web site, which also serves as an excellent example of Marcus' design work.

Jim Marcus is my font hero. The opportunity to make a font out of his handwriting fills me with erect-nippled giddiness. Although it doesn't come close to the caliber of the rest of his fontwork, Mister Marcus was nice enough to scribble a set of letters with a near-dead marker. He faxed the alphabet to me, and I imported it into Fontographer and made it into a font with my patented Soopersecret Alphabetician's Fontmaking Technique. I also added some decorative squibbles which you can find in place of %, ~ and & on your keyboard. I named the font Marcusia in Jimmy's honor.

Enjoy this font and use it often.