Style combination · Pairs well

Arab Independent Comics × Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

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.

From the research on Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef)

Mix them and make something Arab Independent Comics Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art, their arrangement from Arab Independent Comics, the finish from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. 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 Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

Type from Arab Independent Comics: Hand-lettering
Eclectic mixing
Colour from Arab Independent Comics: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Folk & sacred symbols
Stylised figuration
Composition from Arab Independent Comics: Framed panels
Sequential narrative
Surface from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Arab Independent Comics

No!

Rakkas, standing in for Hand-lettered colloquial Arabic balloons (Egyptian ʿāmmiyya in TokTok and Garage, Tunisian in Lab619, Moroccan darija, with Amazigh, in Skefkef)

Text · Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper. Three idioms share them: portraits of martyrs with wings and eye patches; neo-Pharaonic friezes of mourning and marching women by Luxor-trained muralists; and sardonic caricatures, stencils and Arabic slogans against the army, Mubarak and later Morsi. Whitewashed again and again, the walls were repainted in reply.

Newsreader; Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art used Freehand Arabic slogans in spray paint and marker, sometimes with English lines, scrawled beside and over the pictures and Historical lām-alif ('no') forms collected from buildings, mosques, ceramics, textiles and books across the Islamic world, sprayed by Bahia Shehab

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Arab Independent Comics, with a counter-accent from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

#f1ece1 ground · 36%
#161514 ink · 14%
#f0c419 accent · 18%
#c8102e accent · 14%
#e2463a accent · 10%
#c8963e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1ece1;
  --ink: #161514;
  --accent-1: #f0c419;
  --accent-2: #c8102e;
  --accent-3: #e2463a;
  --accent-4: #c8963e;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

Use it with care

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.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals): These walls commemorate real people killed or maimed in 2011–13, whose families are alive, alongside images of women assaulted by security forces, Qur'anic verses and Coptic and Islamic sacred imagery; do not reuse martyr portraits, eye patches or the 'blue bra' as edgy protest styling for a brand, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and credit the artists and photographers by name. The walls were also religiously contested: Awad painted some of his Pharaonic women nude as a stand against the Wahhabi style of Islam, and Salafists erased some martyr portraits and put Qur'anic verses in their place, so do not pair those figures with Qur'anic verses for effect. After July 2013 the interim government built its own martyrs' memorial in Tahrir, which protesters wrecked, and the Muslim Brotherhood staked its own claim to the revolution's dead, so check whose dead a reused martyr motif would seem to mourn. Political street art remains dangerous in Egypt: Ganzeer was detained in 2011, four graffiti artists were detained for 12 hours in May 2015 after painting a mural, and 400 copies of Walls of Freedom were confiscated in Alexandria for allegedly 'inciting violence', so never put Egyptian artists or collaborators at risk with work attributed to them.

The two styles

A comic-style poster follows a curly-haired person in a purple hoodie searching for a black-and-white cat through city streets, beside a bus, beneath a vehicle, and across rooftops. The final panel shows the person cuddling the cat on a rooftop beneath a yellow moon.

2007–present · Middle East & North Africa Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) 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.

A distressed, Egyptian-inspired illustrated poster centres on a young man with an eye bandage, a red halo and outspread multicoloured wings beneath the words “STILL HERE.” Military portraits, riot police, a funeral procession, Egyptian deities, flowers and birds fill the surrounding ochre, red, blue and black composition.

2011–2014 · Middle East & North Africa Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper. Three idioms share them: portraits of martyrs with wings and eye patches; neo-Pharaonic friezes of mourning and marching women by Luxor-trained muralists; and sardonic caricatures, stencils and Arabic slogans against the army, Mubarak and later Morsi. Whitewashed again and again, the walls were repainted in reply.

More combinations

With Arab Independent Comics

With Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

Every style combination