Style combination · Contrasts

Arab Children's Comic Magazines × Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines

The same weekly cartoon-magazine machine aimed at adults and at power: its swollen caricature and political covers show what the children's weeklies kept out.

From the research on Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid)

Mix them and make something Arab Children's Comic Magazines Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines, their arrangement from Arab Children's Comic Magazines, the finish from Arab Children's Comic Magazines. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid) Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)

Type from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from Arab Children's Comic Magazines: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines: Distortion & exaggeration
Stylised figuration
Composition from Arab Children's Comic Magazines: Framed panels
Sequential narrative
Surface from Arab Children's Comic Magazines: Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines

Hello

Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-lettered capitals in speech balloons and caption blocks, with the Turkish İ, Ş, Ğ and Ç drawn in (the Uykusuz cover of 12 November 2008, the Gırgır cover of 10 August 2011)

Text · Arab Children's Comic Magazines

Arabic children's comics weeklies, from Dar al-Hilal's Samir in Cairo (1956) to Abu Dhabi's Majid (1979), mixing translated Western strips with house characters by Egyptian, Lebanese, Armenian and European artists. Pages read right to left: flat bright full-colour panels, rounded cartoon children in local dress, hand-lettered Arabic balloons and drawn sound effects, shared with quizzes, puzzles, contests, letters and lessons, under a boy mascot who names the magazine. The look is that of the colour weeklies of the 1950s to 1990s; Majid went monthly in 2020, redesigned by Studio Safar.

Archivo; Arab Children's Comic Magazines used Hand-lettered Arabic balloon text, read right to left and Drawn Arabic onomatopoeia and expressive balloon lettering

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Arab Children's Comic Magazines, with a counter-accent from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid) Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)

#f6f0dc ground · 36%
#1d1a17 ink · 14%
#f6c928 accent · 18%
#e23b2e accent · 14%
#2f8fd0 accent · 10%
#3f9b4a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f6f0dc;
  --ink: #1d1a17;
  --accent-1: #f6c928;
  --accent-2: #e23b2e;
  --accent-3: #2f8fd0;
  --accent-4: #3f9b4a;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid): Samir, Majid, Kaslan Jiddan, Fudooli, Ammouna and the magazines' mastheads belong to their publishers (Dar al-Hilal, Abu Dhabi Media) and artists, and the Arabic Disney and Tintin pages to Disney and Hergé's estate: draw your own mascot, characters and masthead, never ask an image model for these characters or a named artist's hand, and never present a generated page as a vintage issue. The tradition's artists also drew caricature, such as 'Ib Goha and Sambo' by Samir co-founder Haroon, about an Arab boy and his Black Nubian sidekick Sambo: give every character, Black, Nubian, foreign or villain, the same drawing care, and never make skin colour or features the joke. Draw everyday Egyptian, Levantine and Gulf children in the dress they actually wear (gallabiya, kandura and ghutra, shayla, school uniforms), not Orientalist shorthand (camels, harem veils, oil-sheikh caricatures, pseudo-Arabic squiggles), and do not copy Hergé's stereotyped Arabs of the invented Khemed, who are 'always the punchline' (Nadim Damluji). Leave religious pages to writers and readers of the faith, and have all Arabic lettering written or checked by a fluent reader, joined and running right to left.

Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz): Avanak Avni, Penguen's penguin trying to fly, Uykusuz's man in a vest and the magazines' mastheads belong to their makers and publishers: draw your own characters and masthead, never ask an image model for a named cartoonist's hand or a real magazine's cover, and do not present a generated cover as an issue of Gırgır, LeMan, Penguen or Uykusuz. This satire has cost its makers dearly (Penguen's Bahadır Baruter faced a one-year prison sentence in 2011 over words drawn on a mosque wall, and LeMan's editors were detained in 2025 over a cartoon read as depicting the Prophet Muhammad), and it carried its own prejudices: Uykusuz and Gırgır caricatures that turned Erdoğan into Obama drew their humour from exaggerating Obama's racial features (Çetintaş 2023), and gag strips such as Otisabi on Uykusuz's back cover made comedy of a man's manipulative seduction of women, which a 2026 study reads as objectifying them, even as it finds the strips also critique and subvert those norms. Do not reproduce either. Aim the satire at power and its pomposity, not at faith, ethnicity, gender or the bodies of the powerless: the swollen head belongs to the leader. Remember too that caricaturing a Turkish head of state has repeatedly brought lawsuits.

The two styles

A colourful Arabic comic poster shows children discovering litter on a beach, collecting it with gloves and bags, sorting waste into coloured bins, and celebrating together. In the bottom panel, four children sit facing the sea and a sunset, with sailboats and a coastal town in the distance.

1956–present · Middle East & North Africa Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid) Arabic children's comics weeklies, from Dar al-Hilal's Samir in Cairo (1956) to Abu Dhabi's Majid (1979), mixing translated Western strips with house characters by Egyptian, Lebanese, Armenian and European artists. Pages read right to left: flat bright full-colour panels, rounded cartoon children in local dress, hand-lettered Arabic balloons and drawn sound effects, shared with quizzes, puzzles, contests, letters and lessons, under a boy mascot who names the magazine. The look is that of the colour weeklies of the 1950s to 1990s; Majid went monthly in 2020, redesigned by Studio Safar.

A political cartoon shows an oversized, sweating man in a black suit and red tie standing over heaps of money, buildings and a luxury car, while distressed people crawl beneath them. Speech balloons contain a rising chart, an empty plate, a modern skyline and cheering children, beneath blank yellow and red jagged banners.

1972–2025 · Middle East & North Africa Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Istanbul's weekly cartoon magazines, from the Aral brothers' Gırgır (1972), which sold up to about half a million copies, through the chain of breakaways that followed it: Limon, LeMan, Penguen and Uykusuz. Each issue was made by a cartoonists' collective: a cover with one big caricature of the week's politics under a huge outlined masthead, then signed corners, strips, serials, joke columns and readers' cartoons, hand-lettered in street Turkish. The leaders it caricatured answered with bans, lawsuits and prosecutions.

More combinations

With Arab Children's Comic Magazines

With Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines

Every style combination