Style combination · Contrasts

L'Association and French Alternative Comics × Story Manga

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.

From the research on L'Association and French Alternative Comics

Mix them and make something L'Association and French Alternative Comics Story Manga

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from L'Association and French Alternative Comics, their arrangement from L'Association and French Alternative Comics, the finish from Story Manga. 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.

L'Association and French Alternative Comics Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics)

Type from Story Manga: Rotated & vertical setting
Hand-lettering
Colour from L'Association and French Alternative Comics: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from L'Association and French Alternative Comics: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from L'Association and French Alternative Comics: Framed panels
Sequential narrative
Surface from Story Manga: Halftone & Ben-Day dots

L'Association and French Alternative Comics avoids halftone & ben-day dots: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

The type

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

Display · Story Manga

Pop

Mochiy Pop One, standing in for Anchi-goshi balloon setting (gothic kanji with bold antique kana, アンチゴチ: the antique kana is a bold face of the 1890s from the kagomoji of Edo temple plaques, not a Mincho; the default for children’s manga by about 1960 and across commercial manga with desktop publishing)

Text · L'Association and French Alternative Comics

The black-and-white auteur comics of L'Association, the Paris publisher founded by seven cartoonists in 1990, and the 1990s small-press scene it led. Against the 48-page hardback colour album, it printed dream diaries, memoirs and formal games in black ink on white paper, in books of many sizes, from 24-page pocket booklets to A4 albums and the 2,000-page wordless Comix 2000. Every author keeps a personal hand: David B.'s crowded black masses, Satrapi's flat, frontal figures, Trondheim's improvised felt-tip rabbits. Covers add one or two flat inks.

Caveat; L'Association and French Alternative Comics used Captions and balloons lettered by hand in each author's own writing and Story and chapter titles drawn large in white capitals reversed out of a black panel or band

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from L'Association and French Alternative Comics, with a counter-accent from Story Manga. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

L'Association and French Alternative Comics Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics)

#fbfaf6 ground · 36%
#011021 ink · 14%
#ffb200 accent · 18%
#d32f2f accent · 14%
#ffdf6c accent · 10%
#cfcfcf accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #fbfaf6;
  --ink: #011021;
  --accent-1: #ffb200;
  --accent-2: #d32f2f;
  --accent-3: #ffdf6c;
  --accent-4: #cfcfcf;
  --font-display: "Mochiy Pop One", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Caveat", cursive;
}

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.

Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics): Manga characters and series, from Astro Boy to Dragon Ball and One Piece, are in copyright and belong to their creators and publishers, and manga is the living work of professional artists and assistants: draw original characters in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for a named series, character or artist's hand, and label generated pages as AI-made rather than presenting them as a manga artist's work. Some of Tezuka's own books drew foreigners, including Black Africans and Asians, in exaggerated caricature; after protests from September 1990 by the Osaka-based Association to Stop Racism Against Blacks, Tezuka Productions put a disclaimer slip into his books. Give every character the same drawing care, and never use skin, lips or dress as ethnic shorthand.