Style combination · Contrasts
Bonelli Fumetto × Story Manga
Both are long black-and-white serials born in the late 1940s. Story manga slants, enlarges and bleeds its panels and gets its greys from screentone; Bonelli keeps every panel rectangular inside three strips and puts no tone on the page.
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.
Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics) Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics)
- Type from Bonelli Fumetto
- Colour from Story Manga
- Form from Bonelli Fumetto
- Composition from Bonelli Fumetto
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Story Manga avoids modular grid: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Surface from Story Manga
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Bonelli Fumetto avoids halftone & ben-day dots: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Bonelli Fumetto
Ours
Londrina Solid, standing in for Typeset capitals, not hand lettering, for the episode title on a band at the foot of the cover and for straplines: heavy sans reversed out of black for I VAMPIRI (Dylan Dog no. 62) and AGENTE SPECIALE ALFA (Nathan Never no. 1), beside the price in a roundel (L. 2300); serif for CON LA CODA DELL'OCCHIO and the straplines I GRANDI ENIGMI DI and DETECTIVE DELL'IMPOSSIBILE (Martin Mystère no. 315)
Text · Story Manga
The black-and-white narrative comic of postwar Japan, from Tezuka Osamu's Shin Takarajima (1947) to the weekly boys' magazines of 1959 and 1968 and the paperbacks that collect them. Pages read right to left; panels change size and slant, bleed off the page and are broken by figures, cutting like film. Grey comes from dot screentone; motion and feeling from speed lines, focus lines and a codified set of symbols. Dialogue runs vertically in tall balloons, sound effects are drawn into the picture, and big-eyed, simplified characters act against detailed backgrounds.
Shippori Mincho; Story Manga used Anchi-goshi balloon setting and Fine Mincho balloon setting
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Story Manga, with a counter-accent from Bonelli Fumetto. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics) Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics)
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#f6f3eaground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#d32f2faccent · 18% -
#f2cf1daccent · 14% -
#cfcfcfaccent · 10% -
#8c8c8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f6f3ea;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #d32f2f;
--accent-2: #f2cf1d;
--accent-3: #cfcfcf;
--accent-4: #8c8c8c;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}Use it with care
Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics): Tex, Zagor, Dylan Dog, Nathan Never, Julia and their mastheads belong to Sergio Bonelli Editore and are still published and licensed: draw your own hero, masthead and cover bands in the shared format, never ask an image model for these characters or for a named artist's hand (Galep, Ferri, Villa, Stano), nor for a real person's likeness (Dylan Dog was drawn after Rupert Everett, Julia after Audrey Hepburn), and label generated pages as AI-made, never as vintage Bonelli issues. Tex is 'supreme chief of all the Navajo tribes' under the name Aquila della Notte, and his blood brother Tiger Jack is a Navajo warrior: these are an Italian western's inventions, not Diné culture. The Diné (Navajo) are a living nation; do not borrow their ceremonial imagery, sandpaintings or weaving designs as western decor, and do not dress a page's generic 'Indians' as Diné.
Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics): Manga characters and series, from Astro Boy to Dragon Ball and One Piece, are in copyright and belong to their creators and publishers, and manga is the living work of professional artists and assistants: draw original characters in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for a named series, character or artist's hand, and label generated pages as AI-made rather than presenting them as a manga artist's work. Some of Tezuka's own books drew foreigners, including Black Africans and Asians, in exaggerated caricature; after protests from September 1990 by the Osaka-based Association to Stop Racism Against Blacks, Tezuka Productions put a disclaimer slip into his books. Give every character the same drawing care, and never use skin, lips or dress as ethnic shorthand.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Bonelli Fumetto
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both stage figures in researched, realistic settings in ruled panels with hand-lettered balloons. Choose ligne claire for one even, unhatched contour and flat colour in a hardback album; choose Bonelli for hatched, spotted-black ink without colour in a cheap monthly paperback.
- Amar Chitra Katha Comics Contrasts · Both lay out regular tiers of ruled panels with white gutters and hand-lettered capitals. Amar Chitra Katha fills every page with flat colour and teaches myth and history in about 32 pages in an authoritative voice; a Bonelli issue keeps about a hundred interior pages in black ink and tells a serial hero's adventure for entertainment.
- Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid) Pairs well · Both design the series rather than the single book: a fixed cover template in which only the title and the picture change. Borrow Penguin's genre colour code and fixed type positions for a set of Bonelli-style covers, keeping the outlined masthead and the black title band.
- Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Contrasts · Italy's other newsstand serial of the late 1940s, also told in a plain grid of ruled frames with balloons. Choose the fotoromanzo for staged photographs and melodrama; choose Bonelli for pen-and-ink westerns, horror, mystery and science fiction.
- Filipino Komiks Contrasts · The nearest style by genome: both are black-and-white newsstand comics drawn in naturalistic brush and pen, with colour kept for the cover. Komiks pack short instalments of about four pages into anthology magazines; Bonelli gives one hero a book-length episode in a constant three-strip cage, under the same cover trade dress every month.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Bonelli's artists learned from American adventure cartoonists (Ferri named Phil Davis, Hal Foster and Alex Raymond). Choose the American comic book for flat four-colour dot tints over the keyline and figures that burst the panel border; choose Bonelli for an uncoloured ink page in a fixed grid of three strips.
- Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia) Contrasts · Both are black-and-white newsstand adventure serials born in 1948 and drawn in pen and brush ink; Bonelli keeps a fixed cage of three strips of one or two panels on a small upright page and an even naturalistic line, while the historieta's 1950s weeklies run three tiers of two to six panels each across an oblong page, sink them in solid black, light faces from one side and, with Breccia, let the drawing break into expressionist texture.
- Giallo Mondadori Covers (I Libri Gialli) Pairs well · Milan's other newsstand serial: Bonelli's constant masthead and single dramatic cover scene sit well beside the yellow-and-circle trade dress in a set of popular-fiction covers.
With Story Manga
- Korean Webtoon Graphics Contrasts · The Korean webtoon turned manhwa, Korean comics shaped in part by Japanese manga, into a single full-colour scroll column with long empty gutters, first on PC portals and then on phones; return to story manga for a printed spread of black-and-white panels read right to left, with screentone and panels that bleed and break.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Both are mass-market pen-and-ink comics with balloons and sound effects; the American comic book reads left to right in four-colour dot tints with hand-lettered capitals in a steadier grid, while story manga stays black and white, reads right to left, greys with screentone and sets its dialogue vertically.
- Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Contrasts · Both are cheap, widely rented East Asian picture-story books; lianhuanhua gives each palm-sized page one framed drawing with a caption beneath and no balloons, while story manga packs a page with panels of changing size, balloons, speed lines and drawn sound effects.
- Superflat Contrasts · Murakami's Superflat lifts anime and manga figures out of the story onto one flat, glossy, polychrome plane for the gallery; story manga keeps the sequence, the depth of its backgrounds and its single black ink.
- Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration Pairs well · Jojōga's large, highlighted, long-lashed eyes passed from Nakahara Jun'ichi to Takahashi Macoto, who added stars and dots to the iris, and so into shōjo manga; add Taishō lyrical faces, kimono patterns and soft lines to a manga page for a period romance.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Ligne claire closes every form with one even contour and flat colour, with no hatching or tone; story manga varies its line weight and builds grey and mood from screentone, solid blacks, speed lines and focus lines.
- Kawaii Design Pairs well · Kawaii takes manga's round faces and symbols but not its page; borrow its pastel mascots and rounded type for a comedy chapter, a character goods tie-in or a super-deformed aside, and keep the panels and screentone.
- Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics) Pairs well · Girls' manga grew out of story manga from Tezuka's Princess Knight on and took its flowers, screentone moods and floating monologues furthest; borrow those when a story-manga page needs interior feeling rather than action.