Style combination · Pairs well
Punk × Underground Comix
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.
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.
Punk & DIY Zine Underground Comix
- Type from Punk
- Colour from Punk
- Form from Underground Comix
- Composition from Underground Comix
- Surface from Punk
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
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 Punk, with a counter-accent from Underground Comix. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Punk & DIY Zine Underground Comix
-
#f2efe6ground · 36% -
#0d0d0dink · 14% -
#ff2fa0accent · 18% -
#f2c12eaccent · 14% -
#d7191caccent · 10% -
#8c8c8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2efe6;
--ink: #0d0d0d;
--accent-1: #ff2fa0;
--accent-2: #f2c12e;
--accent-3: #d7191c;
--accent-4: #8c8c8c;
--font-display: "Rock Salt", 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 Punk
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Borrow Constructivist diagonals and red-and-black bars to give punk collage the agitprop structure post-punk sleeves later adopted.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Run punk collages through a riso in fluoro pink and black to keep the DIY ethic while gaining richer, layered colour.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Deface a clean corporate identity with xerox collage to make the critique of polish and authority explicit.
- Frutiger Aero Contrasts · Glossy optimism is everything punk rejects; one torn xerox fragment on an aero gradient reads as instant sabotage.
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) Contrasts · Both mix found type with appropriated pictures, but punk tears and photocopies while Fluxus keeps a clean offset black, justified blocks and a tight edge-to-edge grid; use the Fluxus version when cheap materials should still look ordered.
- Natural Wine Label Art Pairs well · Alice Feiring calls the earlier natural-wine scene punk rock: of Gut Oggau she says 'This is where things grow up and stop being so punk rock' (Punch, 2021). Take punk's refusal of professional polish but drop the collage and the anger: one felt-pen picture on a white label carries the same do-it-yourself stance in a friendlier voice.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Contrasts · Both scribble over photographs, but punk's photocopied blacks and ransom-note type are cheap and nihilist, while Grapus prints bright offset colour, mostly on white, in an optimistic, party-backed voice.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Contrasts · Punk reprised the situationist prank in the late 1970s, but it packs torn photocopies and mixed type into crowded pages; détournement keeps a few recognisable fragments and lets each one say the opposite of what it said. Borrow the rewritten balloon when a punk layout needs a sharper argument.
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.
- 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.