Garo and Heta-uma × Underground Comix

A US counterculture parallel in crude, rebellious line; heta-uma is quieter, flatter and more deadpan.

From the research on Garo and Heta-uma (Japanese Underground Manga and 'Bad-Good' Illustration)

Mix them and make something Garo and Heta-uma Underground Comix

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Garo and Heta-uma, their arrangement from Underground Comix, the finish from Garo and Heta-uma. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Garo and Heta-uma (Japanese Underground Manga and 'Bad-Good' Illustration) Underground Comix

Type from Underground Comix: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from Underground Comix: Monochrome
Light ground
Form from Garo and Heta-uma: Distortion & exaggeration
Stylised figuration
Composition from Underground Comix: Framed panels
Sequential narrative
Surface from Garo and Heta-uma: Paper & letterpress bite

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Underground Comix

Noise

Bangers, standing in for Pen-drawn balloon capitals (each cartoonist's own hand on the page, in the same pen as the drawing)

Text · Garo and Heta-uma

The deliberately crude, naive-looking drawing of Japan's alternative manga and illustration, centred on the magazine Garo (1964-2002) from the 1970s. Wobbly pen lines, flat or scratchy fills and unpolished hand lettering were chosen on purpose, as 'bad but good' (heta-uma), against the polished look of commercial story manga. Garo also ran realist gekiga, which is outside this idiom. Modern viewers regard a rabbit painting attributed to Tokugawa Iemitsu as an early precursor. The idiom reached illustration and marketing in the 1970s and 1980s.

Zen Maru Gothic; Garo and Heta-uma used Uneven hand-drawn katakana and hiragana lettering inside the drawing and Hand-lettered Garo titles and credits in brush and pen

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Underground Comix, with a counter-accent from Garo and Heta-uma. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Garo and Heta-uma (Japanese Underground Manga and 'Bad-Good' Illustration) Underground Comix

#f1e9d4 ground · 36%
#141210 ink · 14%
#f2c12e accent · 18%
#d8392b accent · 14%
#8a8478 accent · 10%
#c9307a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1e9d4;
  --ink: #141210;
  --accent-1: #f2c12e;
  --accent-2: #d8392b;
  --accent-3: #8a8478;
  --accent-4: #c9307a;
  --font-display: "Bangers", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Zen Maru Gothic", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

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.