This "problem" appeared lately with 1.1a as far as I can tell. During startup consolefont fails. setfont does not want to work even with rc.conf set properly. setfont reports that fontheight is zero and quits.
The old consolefont package is replaced with kbd, run: # epm -l kbd to see a list of valid fonts. Thus the font you used from consolechars is prob not included in kbd, and many do not work with kbd. You need gentoolkit installed for this.