Style combination · Pairs well
L'Association and French Alternative Comics × Underground Comix
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.
Mix them and make something L'Association and French Alternative Comics 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.
L'Association and French Alternative Comics Underground Comix
- Type from Underground Comix
- Colour from L'Association and French Alternative Comics
- Form from Underground Comix
- Composition from L'Association and French Alternative Comics
- Surface from L'Association and French Alternative Comics
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Underground Comix avoids flat: this is where the two pull against each other.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Underground Comix
No!
Bangers, standing in for Pen-drawn balloon capitals (each cartoonist's own hand on the page, in the same pen as the drawing)
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from L'Association and French Alternative Comics, with a counter-accent from Underground Comix. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
L'Association and French Alternative Comics Underground Comix
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#fbfaf6ground · 36% -
#011021ink · 14% -
#ffb200accent · 18% -
#f2c12eaccent · 14% -
#ffdf6caccent · 10% -
#d4302aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #fbfaf6;
--ink: #011021;
--accent-1: #ffb200;
--accent-2: #f2c12e;
--accent-3: #ffdf6c;
--accent-4: #d4302a;
--font-display: "Bangers", 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.
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 L'Association and French Alternative Comics
- Métal hurlant Science-Fiction Comics (Mœbius, Druillet & Les Humanoïdes Associés) Contrasts · Luminous colour, vast science-fiction vistas and painterly spreads against small black-and-white books about dreams, illness and family: the two poles of adult French comics.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · The colour adventure album with an even contour and researched backgrounds is exactly what these black-and-white memoirs in personal hands were made against; set a page of each side by side to show the break.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Give a black-and-white comic a one- or two-ink Risograph cover to bring its small-press book design into today's indie print culture.
- Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Pairs well · Borrow the woodcut's harsh black masses and distorted figures, as Satrapi's drawing drew on German Expressionism, to give a black-and-white memoir page more weight.
- Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Contrasts · 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.
- Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Pairs well · A younger many-handed small-press scene that also prints mostly in black ink; one of its Beirut titles won Angoulême's alternative comics prize in 2019. Pair the French book design with its dialect lettering and Risograph colour.
With Underground Comix
- Filipino Komiks 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.
- 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.
- 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.