Style combination · Pairs well
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics × L'Association and French Alternative Comics
Borrow the woodcut's harsh black masses and distorted figures, as Satrapi's drawing drew on German Expressionism, to give a black-and-white memoir page more weight.
Mix them and make something Expressionist Woodcut Graphics L'Association and French Alternative Comics
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.
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics L'Association and French Alternative Comics
- Type from L'Association and French Alternative Comics
- Colour from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
- Form from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
- Composition from L'Association and French Alternative Comics
- Surface from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · L'Association and French Alternative Comics
No!
Londrina Solid, standing in for Captions and balloons lettered by hand in each author's own writing: slanted mixed-case handwriting in David B.'s caption boxes (Le Cheval blême, L'Ascension du Haut Mal), even capitals in Satrapi's (Persepolis), loose felt-tip capitals in Trondheim's balloons (Lapinot)
Text · Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
The graphic arm of German Expressionism, from Die Brücke in Dresden (1905) to the Berlin journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion and Frans Masereel's woodcut novels. Artists revived the woodcut as a raw, subjective medium: they gouged distorted figures and jagged lettering into the same block and printed them in harsh black or a single flat ink, often on coloured paper, for exhibition posters, portfolios, manifestos and magazine covers.
Special Elite; Expressionist Woodcut Graphics used Hand-cut woodcut capitals and Rudolf Koch's Neuland (Klingspor, 1923), a display face in the same hand-cut spirit
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics, with a counter-accent from L'Association and French Alternative Comics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics L'Association and French Alternative Comics
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#ede4cfground · 36% -
#151311ink · 14% -
#d9932faccent · 18% -
#ffb200accent · 14% -
#c8432baccent · 10% -
#7cc7d9accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ede4cf;
--ink: #151311;
--accent-1: #d9932f;
--accent-2: #ffb200;
--accent-3: #c8432b;
--accent-4: #7cc7d9;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}Use it with care
L'Association and French Alternative Comics: The leading authors are living, named people and much of the work is memoir of real events, so never ask an image model for a named author's hand, and never attribute invented pages or opinions to them; Persepolis tells a real Iranian childhood under revolution and war, so do not lift its veiled schoolgirls as generic shorthand for Iran or for Muslim women; and David B.'s monsters in L'Ascension du Haut Mal are one family's account of epilepsy, not a generic image of illness or disability.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · The parent's smooth whiplash and floral harmony is exactly what the gouge splinters; use one against the other to stage order breaking down.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Hand-cut jagged letters and one cheap ink suit gig posters and zines that want anger without photocopy clichés.
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat Contrasts · Same country and years: Bernhard's calm flat object poster against an anguished Brücke woodcut shows commercial clarity versus inner expression.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Pairs well · Both gouge black-and-white relief images; add TGP's legible headlines and social subjects to steady expressionist distortion for a public message.
- Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Pairs well · Lu Xun's movement learned from Kollwitz and Masereel; set the two side by side to show subjective anguish turning into collective resistance.
- Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) Contrasts · Both distort the figure in protest, but Expressionist prints gouge it from the woodblock with angular, raw marks; Simplicissimus keeps a clean brush contour and flat tints, and adds a punchline.
- Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia) Pairs well · Breccia's white scraped out of a black ground looks like the gouge of a Brücke woodcut; borrow the woodcut's jagged hand-cut capitals for a historieta title page or cover, and keep the comic's panels and captions inside.
- Hungarian Revolutionary Poster Pairs well · Kinchin sees 'a burgeoning taste for Futurist and Expressionist design' in the MA circle's exhibition poster (Bortnyik); add a gouged, splintered edge to the red body when the hero should look anguished rather than triumphant.
With L'Association and French Alternative Comics
- Métal hurlant Science-Fiction Comics (Mœbius, Druillet & Les Humanoïdes Associés) Contrasts · Luminous colour, vast science-fiction vistas and painterly spreads against small black-and-white books about dreams, illness and family: the two poles of adult French comics.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · The colour adventure album with an even contour and researched backgrounds is exactly what these black-and-white memoirs in personal hands were made against; set a page of each side by side to show the break.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Give a black-and-white comic a one- or two-ink Risograph cover to bring its small-press book design into today's indie print culture.
- Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Contrasts · Both are black and white, but manga builds grey from screentone and motion from speed lines; here there is no grey at all, only solid black, white and patterned fills.
- Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) 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.
- Underground Comix Pairs well · A later French-language small-press scene, one of whose founders turned to psychedelic and autobiographical comics after discovering Crumb and Shelton, keeps the black ink and the single author's hand but clears the crowding and the shock; borrow its book design to give a comix page a calmer format.