Style combination · Contrasts
Escuela Bruguera × La Movida Madrileña Graphics
Both are Spanish comics: Bruguera's Barcelona weeklies caricatured postwar losers in regular gag panels for children under Franco's censors, while Madriz and the Movida fanzines gave adults experimental, drug- and sex-aware strips, some of which barely told a story, paid for by Madrid's city council.
Mix them and make something Escuela Bruguera La Movida Madrileña Graphics
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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.
Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) La Movida Madrileña Graphics
- Type from La Movida Madrileña Graphics
- Colour from Escuela Bruguera
- Form from Escuela Bruguera
- Composition from Escuela Bruguera
- Surface from La Movida Madrileña Graphics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · La Movida Madrileña Graphics
Yay!
Londrina Solid, standing in for Free hand lettering over cut-out images ('collage de rotulación libre') in Madrid Me Mata, whose masthead moves from a special display lettering to a plain sans ('de una tipografía especial a otra funcional de palo') and whose 'MMM' works as a zigzag of lightning
Text · Escuela Bruguera
The house style of Editorial Bruguera's humour cartoonists in Barcelona from 1947 to 1986, named the 'Escuela Bruguera' by Terenci Moix in 1968. Grotesque caricatures of everyday Spanish types (a starving tramp, warring spinster sisters, two bungling agents) act out one-page gags in tiers of small panels against barely sketched urban settings, with onomatopoeia and motion symbols, and the gag ends in a blow. Halfway between children's fun and satire of manners, it mirrored postwar hunger and petty tyranny under Franco's censors, who made it soften after the 1955 decree on children's press.
Archivo; Escuela Bruguera used Hand-lettered pen dialogue in balloons and captions and Typed balloon text from the 1960s
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Escuela Bruguera, with a counter-accent from La Movida Madrileña Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) La Movida Madrileña Graphics
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#f5eedbground · 36% -
#1b1a19ink · 14% -
#f3c13aaccent · 18% -
#ff5a1faccent · 14% -
#d63a2faccent · 10% -
#ff2e88accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f5eedb;
--ink: #1b1a19;
--accent-1: #f3c13a;
--accent-2: #ff5a1f;
--accent-3: #d63a2f;
--accent-4: #ff2e88;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics): Mortadelo y Filemón, Zipi y Zape, Carpanta, Superlópez and the other Bruguera characters are still published and adapted by Ediciones B, part of Penguin Random House since 2017 (Bruguera registered characters in its own name, as it did Superlópez, taking them from their authors): draw your own types, mastheads and gags in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for these characters or for a named cartoonist's hand, and do not present a generated page as a vintage tebeo. The humour runs on stock types, violence and humiliation (the spinster hunting a husband, the beaten child): aim the satire at pretension and power, not at people's bodies, sex, class or origin.
La Movida Madrileña Graphics: The Movida's makers are recent and partly living (Mariné and García-Alix still work; Ceesepe died in 2018, Ouka Leele in 2022), and their works and the Madrid Me Mata, Madriz and La Luna mastheads are under copyright: draw your own figures, titles and mastheads in the shared idiom, do not ask an image model for Ceesepe's, Costus's, Ouka Leele's or Mariné's hand, and do not present a generated piece as a period work. Its Virgins and saints, at once camp and devotional, were painted by insiders who grew up under Franco's National Catholicism; turning Catholic images into a joke or a sales gimmick from outside is a different act. The Valle de los Caídos that Costus quoted, renamed Valle de Cuelgamuros under the 2022 Democratic Memory Law, was built largely by Republican political prisoners and holds over 33,000 Civil War dead of both sides, Republicans among them: its imagery is not neutral decoration. The camp idiom came from a queer scene: Costus were a couple, and both died in 1989.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Escuela Bruguera
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Jan's Superlópez began as a parody of Superman: take the comic book's heroic anatomy, foreshortening and cosmic stakes and deflate them into a clerk's one-page gag about office trouble, with a humiliating last panel.
- ROSTA Windows Contrasts · Both tell satire in sequences of crude, flat-colour stock figures with hand lettering; ROSTA hand-stencilled numbered news frames with rhymed captions for shop windows as open agitation, while Bruguera printed balloon gags in children's weeklies that end on a blow and keep the satire under the fun.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both are mid-century European weekly-magazine comics in outlined drawing and flat colour; ligne claire sets caricatured heroes in researched, evenly drawn decor, while the Bruguera gag strip swells its losers into grotesque caricature against barely sketched backgrounds and ends on a blow. Ibáñez's El sulfato atómico (1969) did borrow Franco-Belgian detail, chiefly from Franquin.
- UPA & Cartoon Modern Pairs well · Both caricature ordinary postwar people for laughs; borrow UPA's flat colour fields and sparse, stylised staging for a Bruguera-type gag on a poster or in animation, while keeping the grotesque faces, the onomatopoeia and the final blow.
- Spanish Civil War Poster Contrasts · Barcelona's wartime posters agitated openly in large single images; a decade later in the same city, Bruguera's cartoonists put postwar hunger and petty tyranny into children's gags under Franco's censors, who made them soften after the 1955 decree. Choose the poster for an open call, the gag strip for satire kept under the fun.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) 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.
- Mexican Historieta (Pepines to Sensacionales) Contrasts · Two Spanish-language humour lines of the same decades: Bruguera's tebeos are flat-coloured slapstick for children, while the Sensacionales caricature adult barrio and market types in crowded, fully painted scenes with sex and double meanings.
- Underground Comix Contrasts · Both draw rubbery big-footed caricatures, but Bruguera's are coloured, family-friendly gags; the undergrounds use the same cartoon body for adult taboo.
With La Movida Madrileña Graphics
- Memphis Design Pairs well · Memphis showed its first collection in Milan in 1981, three years before Madrid Me Mata: add its clashing laminate colours, squiggles and geometric primitives to a Movida poster for a fuller 1980s postmodern look, keeping the hand-drawn figures and lettering.
- Angura Theatre Poster Contrasts · Both cram comic figures and their own country's imagery into flat, saturated colour with irony; Japan's angura posters were silkscreened for underground theatre from the mid-1960s, packed edge to edge with Meiji and Shōwa photographs, rising-sun rays and Mount Fuji around a central axis, while the Movida came after Franco's death and drew comics, hand lettering and cut-out photographs of its own people for magazines, bands and films.
- Tropicália Graphic Design Contrasts · Both answer a dictatorship with ironic, saturated, hand-lettered Pop that swallows national kitsch; Tropicália did it under the regime, with cut-out photographs of singers in Art Nouveau curves, while the Movida came after Franco's death, drawing comics and sacred camp with a democratic city council paying for some of the magazines.
- Punk & DIY Zine Contrasts · The Movida grew from Madrid's punk bands and kept the photocopied fanzine and the cut-and-paste page; but where UK and US punk kept to black-and-white xerox with a fluorescent spot ink or two, ransom-note type and anger, the Movida drew its figures by hand, turned the colour up and celebrated the end of a dictatorship. Choose punk for protest, the Movida for a party.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Ceesepe worked after British Pop (Peter Blake, Peter Phillips), Zulueta's posters are plainly Pop, and Mariné modelled Madrid Me Mata on Warhol's Interview: borrow Pop's enlarged, flattened images and visible print for a Movida layout, and keep the drawn people and the Spanish camp.