Style combination · Contrasts
Arab Independent Comics × Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
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.
Mix them and make something Arab Independent Comics Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
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.
Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)
- Type from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
- Colour from Arab Independent Comics
- Form from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
- Composition from Arab Independent Comics
- Surface from Arab Independent Comics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
No!
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 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 Arab Independent Comics, with a counter-accent from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)
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#f1ece1ground · 36% -
#161514ink · 14% -
#f0c419accent · 18% -
#e2463aaccent · 14% -
#9c8ac4accent · 10% -
#8a857caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f1ece1;
--ink: #161514;
--accent-1: #f0c419;
--accent-2: #e2463a;
--accent-3: #9c8ac4;
--accent-4: #8a857c;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", 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.
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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
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.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · 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.
- 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.
- 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.
With Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) Contrasts · Both are weekly humour magazines from a stable of cartoonists, with grotesque caricature in hand-lettered panels. Bruguera kept its satire of manners under children's slapstick for Franco's censors; the Turkish weeklies put named politicians on the cover every week and took the lawsuits that followed.
- ROSTA Windows Contrasts · Both turn the day's political news into hand-lettered satirical drawings for a mass audience. ROSTA stencilled numbered frames as agitation for the new state; the Turkish weeklies caricatured whoever held power, from Özal to Erdoğan, and were banned or sued for it.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Both lettered balloons by hand in capitals over cartoon figures for the newsstand, and Gırgır took its balloons and photomontage from Mad, which began in 1952 as Harvey Kurtzman's comic book for EC. The American comic book told serial adventures in four-colour letterpress; the Turkish weeklies built each issue around one topical caricature of the week's politics, then an anthology of signed gag corners.
- Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design Contrasts · Same city, same decades, opposite density: Istanbul's poster designers reduced a play or film to one flat idea on an open field, while the humour weeklies packed a cover with a caricature, balloons, headline band and price box. Borrow the poster's single idea to calm a crowded cover.
- Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid) Contrasts · 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.
- Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) Contrasts · A later weekly humour magazine of the same satirical stance: Gırgır, Penguen and Uykusuz pack covers with speech balloons, comic strips and colour; Simplicissimus gives one framed drawing and one caption.
- Underground Comix Contrasts · Both learned from Mad and crowd hand-lettered caricature into the panel, but the Istanbul weeklies are mass-circulation collective magazines whose cover lampoons the week's politics, while comix are self-published books whose shock is sex, drugs and taboo.
- O Pasquim Satirical Press Pairs well · Another cartoonist-led weekly where satire and local idiom carry political commentary under pressure.