Style combination · Contrasts
Filipino Komiks × Underground Comix
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.
Mix them and make something Filipino Komiks Underground Comix
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 Underground Comix
- Type from Underground Comix
- Colour from Filipino Komiks
- Form from Underground Comix
- Composition from Filipino Komiks
- Surface from Filipino Komiks
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Underground Comix
Fiesta
Bangers, standing in for Pen-drawn balloon capitals (each cartoonist's own hand on the page, in the same pen as the drawing)
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 Filipino Komiks, with a counter-accent from Underground Comix. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Filipino Komiks Underground Comix
-
#efe7d2ground · 36% -
#171412ink · 14% -
#e3b23caccent · 18% -
#c62a2faccent · 14% -
#7d7466accent · 10% -
#c9307aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe7d2;
--ink: #171412;
--accent-1: #e3b23c;
--accent-2: #c62a2f;
--accent-3: #7d7466;
--accent-4: #c9307a;
--font-display: "Bangers", sans-serif;
--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.
Underground Comix: Much of the canon trades in racial caricature, such as a Black woman drawn as an 'African native' caricature, and in graphic sexual violence against women and casual misogyny, which the women's comics of 1970 and 1972 answered in their own books: borrow the hatched line, the crowded panel and the candour, not the stereotypes, and give every character the same anatomy and drawing care. The characters and mastheads (Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, the Freak Brothers, the Checkered Demon, the Zap logo) still belong to their makers and estates: draw your own, never ask an image model for a named cartoonist's hand, living or dead, and never present a generated page as a vintage comic.
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.
- 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.
- Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics) 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.
With Underground Comix
- Psychedelic Poster Pairs well · Take the cover from the ballroom poster, with its clashing flat inks and melting letters, and keep the hatched black-and-white panels inside, as Zap did with Moscoso and Griffin.
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) 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.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) 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.
- L'Association and French Alternative Comics 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.
- Métal hurlant Science-Fiction Comics (Mœbius, Druillet & Les Humanoïdes Associés) Contrasts · Adult comics of the 1970s in two opposite registers: painted, luminous science-fiction vistas against cheap, crowded black-and-white satire.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Same format, everything else reversed: set a four-colour, Code-approved house-style page beside a hatched black-and-white page by a single author to show what the undergrounds rejected.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Both are cheap, self-published print made outside the mainstream; add cut-and-paste collage and Xerox grit to a hand-drawn comix page for the later punk-zine voice.
- See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints Pairs well · Borrow the comic strip and speech balloon, but cleaned up into a few flat inks and turned against the sexism much of the comix canon traded in.