Style combination · Contrasts
Filipino Komiks × Mexican Historieta
The nearest cousin: another mass anthology of romantic serials with painted covers. Komiks model their figures in hatched and feathered black brush line; choose the Mexican historieta for tonal wash in sepia ink and for the pocket digest with its crowded painted cover.
Mix them and make something Filipino Komiks Mexican Historieta
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.
Filipino Komiks Mexican Historieta (Pepines to Sensacionales)
- Type from Filipino Komiks
- Colour from Mexican Historieta
- Form from Mexican Historieta
- Composition from Filipino Komiks
- Surface from Mexican Historieta
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Filipino Komiks 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 · Filipino Komiks
Square
Comic Neue, standing in for Hand-lettered Tagalog balloons (captions in boxes; capitals on the 1946 Halakhak Komiks cover; mixed-case pen lettering in Velasquez's 1929 Kenkoy strip, which mixed Tagalog, Spanish and English; Tony DeZuniga started at Liwayway as a letterer at 16)
Text · Filipino Komiks
The Philippines' newsstand comics magazines, from Kenkoy in Liwayway (1929) and Ace's Pilipino Komiks (1947) to the fall of the Roces titles in the late 1990s. Weekly or fortnightly anthologies of short Tagalog serials were drawn in black brush and pen in a romantic illustrators' manner: bold curving contours, hatched modelling, dense backgrounds. Casts were folk heroes, aswang and superheroines such as Darna; in the classic years colour was kept for the cover. The state used komiks too, to promote Marcos's martial-law policies and, under Aquino, to urge guerrillas to surrender in romances.
Comic Neue; Filipino Komiks used Hand-lettered Tagalog balloons and Hand-drawn masthead logos
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Mexican Historieta, with a counter-accent from Filipino Komiks. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Filipino Komiks Mexican Historieta (Pepines to Sensacionales)
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#ebdfc3ground · 36% -
#5b3a24ink · 14% -
#f2c12eaccent · 18% -
#d8282eaccent · 14% -
#2a9fd2accent · 10% -
#3f5b45accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ebdfc3;
--ink: #5b3a24;
--accent-1: #f2c12e;
--accent-2: #d8282e;
--accent-3: #2a9fd2;
--accent-4: #3f5b45;
--font-display: "Comic Neue", cursive;
--font-text: "Comic Neue", cursive;
}Use it with care
Filipino Komiks: Darna, Pedro Penduko and other komiks characters are still in copyright and keep being adapted for film and television, and the artists' pages belong to them and their estates: draw your own heroes, mastheads and roundels in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for these characters or for a named artist's hand, and label generated pages as AI-made. Publishers shredded thousands of original pages and few issues were archived or reprinted, so a fake 'vintage komiks' page easily pollutes a thin record. Aswang, amulets and the other creatures and figures of Philippine folk belief belong to living communities, and pre-colonial warriors stand for a national self-image: draw them with the dignity and research the tradition gave them, never as exotic decoration. Aswang lore has stigmatised a real province, Capiz, many of whose people object to its name as the 'hometown of Aswang', and village gossip has branded real neighbours, such as a widow with no one to help her, as aswang: never tie a monster to a named province, town or community. Do not costume living Indigenous peoples (the Igorot, Lumad, Aeta and others) as pre-colonial warriors or as creatures.
Mexican Historieta (Pepines to Sensacionales): Memín Pinguín is drawn in the 'darky' iconography of blackface, and his mother as a 'mammy' caricature; his 2005 Mexican stamps were criticised by the White House press secretary ('racial stereotypes are offensive no matter what their origin'), Jesse Jackson and the Hispanic civil-rights groups LULAC and NCLR, so do not copy his features or use racial caricature of any kind, and give every character the same anatomy and drawing care. Kalimán is an Orientalist figure, a turbaned 'prince of India' and mystic: do not take him as a model for exoticised 'Oriental' types. The Sensacionales and the Libro Vaquero covers sell women's bodies to male readers and are often called machista: draw adults with dignity and consent and leave out the stock 'easy woman'. Memín, Kalimán, La Familia Burrón, Lágrimas, Risas y Amor and El Libro Vaquero are still owned by their publishers and heirs: draw your own characters and mastheads, never ask an image model for these characters or a named artist's hand, and never present a generated page or cover as a vintage historieta.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Filipino Komiks
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Postwar komiks took over the American comic book's format, and from 1971 DC recruited Nestor Redondo, Alfredo Alcala and Alex Niño. Choose the American comic book for flat four-colour dot tints over a keyline; choose komiks for black-and-white pages modelled entirely in hatched and feathered brush ink.
- Jeepney Art Pairs well · Both are Manila's popular street graphics from the same postwar decades. Put a komiks hero, drawn in black brush line, on a jeepney's polychrome panel, chrome trim and shaded sign-painter lettering for a piece that reads as Manila.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both tell stories in ruled panels with hand-lettered balloons, but ligne claire closes forms with one even, unhatched line and flat colour. Komiks swell the brush line and build light and volume from hatching in black and white.
- Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Contrasts · Manga gets its greys from dot screentone and simplifies faces into big-eyed types; komiks model naturalistic figures with brush hatching. Gerry Alanguilan criticised Filipino professionals for adopting a style so closely tied to Japanese identity.
- Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Contrasts · Both are cheap black-line picture stories rented and read at street-level shops. Lianhuanhua give each palm-sized page one framed picture with a caption beneath; komiks pack several panels with speech balloons onto an anthology magazine page.
- Amar Chitra Katha Comics Contrasts · Both retell local myth and history as comics in Asian languages. Amar Chitra Katha prints flat colour on every page in an educational, authoritative voice; komiks keep black-and-white interiors for melodrama, fantasy and folk heroes.
- Underground Comix Contrasts · Both put black-and-white hatched interiors behind colour covers, but komiks drew naturalistic folk heroes and romances for the country's most widely read periodicals, while comix push big-footed caricature into adult taboo for a head-shop audience.
- Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia) Contrasts · Both are black-and-white anthology magazines of long serials with colour kept for the cover; komiks model romantic, naturalistic figures in hatched and feathered brush on a light page, while the historieta builds its pages from black masses, hard light and, in its darkest work, distorted faces.
With Mexican Historieta
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) 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.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Paquín and Pepín began with American syndicated strips and Novaro brought in the American comic-book format in 1949, but the Mexican historieta keeps one sepia or green ink and tonal wash where the American book has four flat colours over Ben-Day dots, and melodrama where it has superheroes.
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Pairs well · Both are mid-century Mexican mass pictures painted for the street and the home; borrow the chromo's glowing painted pin-up and romantic scene for a historieta cover, and keep the outlined masthead and the boxed cover line.
- Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia) Contrasts · Both are Latin American newsstand comics of the mid-century with colour kept for the cover; the Argentine adventure historieta builds its pages from solid black brush ink and side light around an auteur's hand, while the Mexican historieta models its figures in tonal wash, prints them in one brown or green ink and tells anonymous, industrial melodrama.
- Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Contrasts · Both sold sentimental melodrama in sequential panels to a mass, largely female and working-class readership; the fotoromanzo photographs actors, while the historieta draws its lovers in wash, and José G. Cruz's photomontage melodramas and the first, photonovel issues of Lágrimas, Risas y Amor sit between the two.