Style combination · Contrasts
American Four-Colour Comic Book × Arab Independent Comics
TokTok's Andeel called superhero culture foreign: no genre industry, no ruled grid of four-colour panels and no single drawing code, but adult, local stories in whatever hand and dialect each artist brings.
Mix them and make something American Four-Colour Comic Book Arab Independent Comics
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef)
- Type from American Four-Colour Comic Book
- Colour from American Four-Colour Comic Book
- Form from Arab Independent Comics
- Composition from Arab Independent Comics
- Surface from American Four-Colour Comic Book
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · American Four-Colour Comic Book
Ours
Bangers, standing in for Pen-lettered comic-book capitals (balloons and captions drawn with pen or brush and a lettering guide, traditionally all in upper case: Sam Rosen, Ben Oda, Artie Simek, John Costanza, Gaspar Saladino)
Text · Arab Independent Comics
Adult comics magazines edited by Arab artists' collectives since 2007, at times with a ministry grant or an NGO partner: Samandal in Beirut, TokTok in Cairo, Lab619 in Tunis and Skefkef in Casablanca. Each issue gathers many hands and no house style, from grubby brush caricature to fine-art pages, much of it in black ink. Balloons mostly speak street dialect, not classical Arabic, and Samandal ran Arabic right to left beside French and English left to right. Satire aims at police, sect, sex and religion; two comics deemed blasphemous cost Samandal's editors a conviction and fines in 2015.
Schibsted Grotesk; Arab Independent Comics used Hand-lettered colloquial Arabic balloons and Hand-lettered Latin-script balloons
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from American Four-Colour Comic Book, with a counter-accent from Arab Independent Comics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef)
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#f3e9cfground · 36% -
#1b1a1aink · 14% -
#d9262caccent · 18% -
#f0c419accent · 14% -
#2160adaccent · 10% -
#4f9a3eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f3e9cf;
--ink: #1b1a1a;
--accent-1: #d9262c;
--accent-2: #f0c419;
--accent-3: #2160ad;
--accent-4: #4f9a3e;
--font-display: "Bangers", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Schibsted Grotesk", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age): The characters and logos of this tradition (Superman, Batman, Captain America, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four) are still in copyright and trademarked by their publishers: draw your own heroes, logos and seals in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for these characters or for named artists such as Kirby, Ditko or Eisner, and never present a generated picture as a vintage comic. The period also traded in racial caricature, such as Ebony White in Will Eisner's The Spirit, whose blackface features Eisner later admitted were a conscious stereotype, and its wartime issues drew Japanese people as 'powerful monsters or incompetent subhumans' and, at the Writers' War Board's urging late in the war, Germans as a people who embraced aggression and violence. Give every character, enemies and foreigners included, the same anatomy, dignity and drawing care as the hero; never use skin tint, teeth, eyes or dress as ethnic markers, and do not revive the war cover's enemy caricature in a pastiche.
Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef): These are living, named artists working under real censorship: Samandal's editors were prosecuted and fined over two comics, and an Egyptian cartoonist was arrested in January 2016, so never attribute invented political or religious satire to a real artist or collective, and never ask an image model for their work by name. Draw the contemporary city life these artists draw, not Orientalist shorthand: no camels, veiled women, sheikhs or gunmen as stand-ins for 'Arab', and no pseudo-Arabic squiggles. Have every line of dialect Arabic, Darija or Amazigh written or checked by a fluent speaker; if no fluent reader can check it, leave the balloons empty or letter them in Latin script only. Do not borrow the religious and sectarian jokes as edgy decoration outside the communities that made them.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With American Four-Colour Comic Book
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Pairs well · Both are cheap letterpress print that shouts to passers-by; borrow the playbill's stacked display capitals, banners and rules for a comic cover's blurbs and price box, while keeping the comic's hand-drawn letters and keyline art.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Riso's few flat inks, grain and overprint suit a small-press homage to four-colour comics; keep the black keyline, panel grid and hand lettering, and let riso's misregistration stand in for newsprint's.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Roy Lichtenstein enlarged the comic book's Ben-Day dots and single panels into ironic gallery icons; choose the comic book itself when the picture must tell a story across a page of panels at printed size, sincerely, with the dots as small colour tints rather than the subject.
- Push Pin Style Contrasts · Push Pin also drew outlined figures in flat colour in New York, but as single illustrations with revived Victorian and Art Nouveau display faces and witty ornament; switch to the comic book for sequential panels, balloon lettering and dot-screen tints on newsprint.
- Googie & Atomic Age Pairs well · Silver Age artists drew in the same postwar key: Arlen Schumer calls Carmine Infantino's Flash as sleek and streamlined as Detroit's tail fins; add Googie's boomerangs, starbursts and atomic motifs to a science-fiction cover or splash page.
- Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Contrasts · Both tell stories in inked drawings; lianhuanhua gives each pocket-sized page one framed monochrome picture with a caption beneath, while the American comic book packs a page with ruled panels, balloons, sound effects and flat four-colour tints.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both tell stories in ruled panels with balloon lettering and flat colour; ligne claire closes every form with a clear contour and no hatching, and keeps its colour free of dot screens and misregistration, while the American comic book models with feathered brush blacks and prints dot tints slightly off register on newsprint.
- Korean Webtoon Graphics Contrasts · Webtoon's single vertical phone-scroll strip, open gutters and digital gradients belong to the era that replaced hand separations; return to the newsstand comic for a dense page grid of panels, dot tints on newsprint and no gradients.
With Arab Independent Comics
- Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Contrasts · Manga is one codified visual language read right to left. The new wave of Arab comics counts it among its sources, beside European comics and American cartoons, and some artists build a style on it (Hanan al-Kararji, who drew the Cairo graphic novel 18 Days, calls hers 'a blend of manga and Arabness'), but these anthologies set it beside brush caricature and fine-art pages, and may run both reading directions in one issue.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Samandal printed Topia (2017) by Risograph, and Lab619 planned its ninth issue in a 2017 residency, to be printed by Risograph and bound by hand; add two or three translucent riso inks to a black-ink anthology for its cover or centrefold, but keep the dialect lettering and the many hands.
- Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Contrasts · Both set Arabic beside Latin, but that type culture matches the two scripts in font families on rational, mirrored grids, while these anthologies letter both scripts by hand, one story at a time, and mirror whole pages so that the reader turns the magazine round with the script.
- Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Pairs well · The same Cairo moment on paper and on walls: TokTok appeared two weeks before 25 January 2011, and many of these artists mix caricature, illustration, comics and graffiti. Carry a wall's sardonic caricature and slogan into a sequence of panels.
- Lebanese Civil War Party Poster Contrasts · The party posters glorified martyrs and leaders; Lena Merhej said Samandal refused to write about the war, 'a subject that exasperates us', and turned instead to religion, politics and sex, with irony rather than tribute.
- Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid) Contrasts · The adult, black-ink, dialect satire of Samandal and TokTok answers these mostly state-backed children's weeklies: set one raw independent strip against a bright magazine page to show the break.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · Both are collectives' magazines that satirise power in street dialect and have been taken to court for it. The Arab magazines are small art-comics anthologies with no house style and no topical cover; the Turkish weeklies were mass newsstand titles built around one cover caricature of the week's news.
- L'Association and French Alternative Comics Pairs well · A younger many-handed small-press scene that also prints mostly in black ink; one of its Beirut titles won Angoulême's alternative comics prize in 2019. Pair the French book design with its dialect lettering and Risograph colour.