Style combination · Contrasts

Arab Independent Comics × Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

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.

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

Mix them and make something Arab Independent Comics Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster, their arrangement from Arab Independent Comics, the finish from Arab Independent Comics. 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) Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

Type from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Hand-lettering
Brush & pen calligraphy
Colour from Arab Independent Comics: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Emblems & badges
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from Arab Independent Comics: Framed panels
Sequential narrative
Surface from Arab Independent Comics: Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

Ours

Rakkas, standing in for Hand-lettered Arabic headlines in Naskh, Thuluth and Ruqʿa styles for martyr names, epithets, slogans and Qur'anic verses

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

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Arab Independent Comics, with a counter-accent from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

#f1ece1 ground · 36%
#161514 ink · 14%
#f0c419 accent · 18%
#e2463a accent · 14%
#9c8ac4 accent · 10%
#8a857c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1ece1;
  --ink: #161514;
  --accent-1: #f0c419;
  --accent-2: #e2463a;
  --accent-3: #9c8ac4;
  --accent-4: #8a857c;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Schibsted Grotesk", sans-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.

Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: These posters show real people who were killed, many of them young partisans whose families are alive, and some glorify attacks carried out as 'martyrdom operations'; most of the parties that issued them are still active and the war's memory remains contested in Lebanon. Do not use martyr portraits, party emblems or Shiʿa devotional imagery as edgy 'war poster' decoration: cite the posters as historical documents with their archive, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and remember that a party's colours and symbols still align a design with one camp. Hizbullah is banned in several countries, for example the UK (proscribed in full in 2019) and Germany (a 2020 ban on its activity that covers its symbols), where displaying its emblem can itself be an offence. The collections and Maasri's book also lean towards the Left and its Palestinian allies, while the Christian right fought its image war mainly on television, so the leftist look is not the whole war.

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 vintage-style poster shows a black-and-white portrait of a young man wearing a patterned scarf, flanked by mirrored armed figures and red flags. Red Arabic lettering appears beneath a cedar-tree emblem with yellow rays, with mountains and buildings across the top and green leafy branches below.

1975–1990 · Middle East & North Africa Lebanese Civil War Party Poster The posters that some twenty parties and militias pasted on the walls of Beirut and other towns between 1975 and 1990, marking each quarter as one faction's territory. With no state style, every party branded its sheets with its own name, emblem, colours, leader and slogans. The staple was the martyr poster: a public obituary with the fallen partisan's straight photograph, name and dates under a header naming the party, often with its emblem, issued in series. Leftist parties also commissioned painters, and Hizbullah and Amal had martyrs painted into symbolic scenes.

More combinations

With Arab Independent Comics

With Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

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