Style combination · Contrasts
Fotoromanzo × Mexican Historieta
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.
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.
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Mexican Historieta (Pepines to Sensacionales)
- Type from Mexican Historieta
- Colour from Fotoromanzo
- Form from Mexican Historieta
-
Fotoromanzo avoids distortion & exaggeration: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Composition from Fotoromanzo
- Surface from Mexican Historieta
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Mexican Historieta
Amour
Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-lettered balloon and caption text written by a letterer on each page (El Libro Vaquero still had its balloons lettered by hand in 2012)
Text · Fotoromanzo
The photo-romance of the Italian women's weeklies: a melodrama told in staged photographs, first printed by Il mio sogno and Bolero Film in May 1947 and copied from France to Brazil. Actors pose on modest sets or in familiar places, and the stills sit in a plain grid of ruled frames, often two or three to a row. Dialogue in balloons and boxes, lettered by hand or typeset, is pasted over the pictures, and close-ups of faces carry the drama. The weeklies printed the stories in black and white until colour took over in the mid-1970s; covers sold each issue with a photograph of the stars.
Comic Neue; Fotoromanzo used Hand-lettered capitals for narration and balloons and Typeset sans in later work
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Fotoromanzo, with a counter-accent from Mexican Historieta. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Mexican Historieta (Pepines to Sensacionales)
-
#f3f0e8ground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#c62a2faccent · 18% -
#f2c12eaccent · 14% -
#2b5ba6accent · 10% -
#e3a888accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f3f0e8;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #c62a2f;
--accent-2: #f2c12e;
--accent-3: #2b5ba6;
--accent-4: #e3a888;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Comic Neue", cursive;
}Use it with care
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance): Photo-romances starred real actors, some later famous (Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren), and their photographs belong to publishers' archives such as the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori: cast your own models, never ask an image model for a real star's likeness, and never present a generated still as a vintage photo-romance.
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 Fotoromanzo
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Both read as ruled panels with speech balloons; choose the fotoromanzo when the cast should be real people posed in black-and-white photographs and the text may run long, and the comic book when drawn heroes, sound effects and flat colour tints should carry the action.
- Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism Contrasts · Drum's photographs report real township life under condensed headlines; the fotoromanzo stages fiction for the camera and runs it as a grid of stills with balloons.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Blow up a single photo-romance frame with its balloon to poster size for a Pop-style quotation of mass romance, as Lichtenstein did with drawn romance comics. Rewriting the balloons is a different precedent: Hara-Kiri's parodies and the Situationists' détournements of Nous Deux, not Pop.
- Onitsha Market Pamphlets Contrasts · Both are cheap popular romance print from 1947; the Onitsha pamphlets tell their stories in letterpress text with a recycled photograph only on the cover, while the fotoromanzo tells the whole story in staged photographs with balloons.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Set the photo-story on an exact modular grid with a neutral grotesque in the dialogue boxes, so the melodrama sits in a clean editorial frame.
- Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Contrasts · Both are cheap picture stories read by millions in monochrome; lianhuanhua draws one framed picture per pocket-sized page with a caption beneath, while the fotoromanzo photographs actors and sets several frames to a magazine page with balloons.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Pairs well · The photo-romance was a raw material René Viénet named in Internationale situationniste no. 11 (1967), calling for photo-romances to be détourned by adding or altering their speech bubbles: keep the photographed lovers and the grid of frames untouched and change only the balloons, so that the melodrama speaks against itself.
- Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover) Contrasts · The postwar photo-romance sold love stories with photographed couples in close-up; the illustrated cover gives up the photograph so that readers can picture themselves in the role and the cover tells nothing of the heat level.
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.
- Filipino Komiks Contrasts · 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.