Style combination · Pairs well
O Pasquim Satirical Press × Underground Comix
Share the hand-drawn, irreverent cartoon line, but borrow Pasquim's column-and-interview newspaper page for a more journalistic result.
Mix them and make something O Pasquim Satirical Press 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.
O Pasquim Satirical Press Underground Comix
- Type from O Pasquim Satirical Press
- Colour from O Pasquim Satirical Press
- Form from Underground Comix
- Composition from Underground Comix
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O Pasquim Satirical Press avoids framed panels: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Surface from O Pasquim Satirical Press
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02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · O Pasquim Satirical Press
Noise
Londrina Solid, standing in for Cartoonists' own hand lettering
Text · Underground Comix
Self-published, adults-only comic books from the San Francisco counterculture, made outside the Comics Code on the newsstand comic's format. Inside, pages of black pen-and-ink line on white paper, often heavily cross-hatched, crowded with big-footed caricatures and hand-lettered balloons, parody the look of 1940s children's comics while showing sex, drugs and violence; colour is kept for the cover, some of it drawn by psychedelic poster artists.
Newsreader; Underground Comix used Pen-drawn balloon capitals and Mock-vintage comic masthead lettering
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from O Pasquim Satirical Press, with a counter-accent from Underground Comix. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
O Pasquim Satirical Press Underground Comix
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#e8e0ccground · 36% -
#1a1a1aink · 14% -
#8a8575accent · 18% -
#f2c12eaccent · 14% -
#d4302aaccent · 10% -
#c9307aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e8e0cc;
--ink: #1a1a1a;
--accent-1: #8a8575;
--accent-2: #f2c12e;
--accent-3: #d4302a;
--accent-4: #c9307a;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", 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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With O Pasquim Satirical Press
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · A rigid grid and neutral type are the opposite of Pasquim's dense, hand-lettered, cartoon-filled page.
- Tropicália Graphic Design Pairs well · A contemporary Brazilian counterculture; Tropicália's colour and collage can lift Pasquim's monochrome page.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Pairs well · Another cartoonist-led weekly where satire and local idiom carry political commentary under pressure.
- Il Male Newspaper-Forgery Satire Pairs well · Another satirical newspaper with cartoons; Il Male differs by forging real papers' front pages rather than publishing an original tabloid.
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.
- 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.