Style combination · Contrasts

Simplicissimus Satirical Style × Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines

A later weekly humour magazine of the same satirical stance: Gırgır, Penguen and Uykusuz pack covers with speech balloons, comic strips and colour; Simplicissimus gives one framed drawing and one caption.

From the research on Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)

Mix them and make something Simplicissimus Satirical Style Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Simplicissimus Satirical Style, their arrangement from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines, the finish from Simplicissimus Satirical Style. 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.

Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)

Type from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from Simplicissimus Satirical Style: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Simplicissimus Satirical Style: Distortion & exaggeration
Stylised figuration
Composition from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines: Framed panels
Single focal point
Surface from Simplicissimus Satirical Style: Flat

The type

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

Display · Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines

No!

Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-lettered capitals in speech balloons and caption blocks, with the Turkish İ, Ş, Ğ and Ç drawn in (the Uykusuz cover of 12 November 2008, the Gırgır cover of 10 August 2011)

Text · Simplicissimus Satirical Style

The house style of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus, set by Th. Th. Heine, Eduard Thöny, Bruno Paul, Rudolf Wilke and Olaf Gulbransson. Each page is one drawing that is the joke: an officer, priest, junker, profiteer or minister in a sure contour, black silhouettes and two or three flat tints inside a ruled frame, with a Fraktur title above and a punchline, usually spoken, below. It turned the Jugendstil line from ornament to caricature, and the 1898 Palestine issue brought confiscation and prison sentences for Heine and Wedekind.

EB Garamond; Simplicissimus Satirical Style used The hand-drawn SIMPLICISSIMUS masthead and Set Fraktur for the title centred above each drawing and for the parenthetical artist credit

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Simplicissimus Satirical Style, with a counter-accent from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)

#f0e6cc ground · 36%
#1b1a18 ink · 14%
#c4382c accent · 18%
#d6a444 accent · 14%
#2f5ea8 accent · 10%
#c85d80 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0e6cc;
  --ink: #1b1a18;
  --accent-1: #c4382c;
  --accent-2: #d6a444;
  --accent-3: #2f5ea8;
  --accent-4: #c85d80;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich): Its caricature works by types, and that cuts both ways. Some pages drew colonised Africans as caricatures even when the target was the colonisers (Heine's Kolonialmächte, 1904). From August 1914 the magazine backed the war and turned its satire on the enemy nations, including racist pictures of non-European and Russian troops, and in the Weimar years it still ran nationalist jokes against the Allied victors and France. After 1933 it followed the Nazi line, including antisemitic satire, while Heine, hated by the Nazis not least for his Jewish origin, was forced out and fled. Several of its canonical draughtsmen served the regime: Hitler made Thöny an honorary professor in 1938 and put him on the Gottbegnadeten list in 1944; Schilling, a fierce critic of the Nazis before 1933, became their propagandist; and in the last issue of September 1944 Gulbransson, Schilling and Thöny supplied propaganda drawings. Take the method of 1896–1914 and 1919–1933 (one framed drawing, flat tints, a spoken punchline) and aim it at power. Exaggerate the uniform, bearing and costume of the powerful, not ethnicity, religion, disability or the bodies of the powerless. The profiteer, the usurer and the octopus gripping its victims (Heine's Der Wucher, 1923) were also stock antisemitic codes in these years, so mark a profiteer by class (top hat, monocle, fur collar), never by ethnic features. Gulbransson (d. 1958), George Grosz (d. 1959) and Bruno Paul (d. 1968) are still in copyright in the EU, until the end of 2028, 2029 and 2038; Heine's work has been public domain there since 2019. Draw your own, do not present a new design as a Simplicissimus page, and do not use the bulldog as a mark.

Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz): Avanak Avni, Penguen's penguin trying to fly, Uykusuz's man in a vest and the magazines' mastheads belong to their makers and publishers: draw your own characters and masthead, never ask an image model for a named cartoonist's hand or a real magazine's cover, and do not present a generated cover as an issue of Gırgır, LeMan, Penguen or Uykusuz. This satire has cost its makers dearly (Penguen's Bahadır Baruter faced a one-year prison sentence in 2011 over words drawn on a mosque wall, and LeMan's editors were detained in 2025 over a cartoon read as depicting the Prophet Muhammad), and it carried its own prejudices: Uykusuz and Gırgır caricatures that turned Erdoğan into Obama drew their humour from exaggerating Obama's racial features (Çetintaş 2023), and gag strips such as Otisabi on Uykusuz's back cover made comedy of a man's manipulative seduction of women, which a 2026 study reads as objectifying them, even as it finds the strips also critique and subvert those norms. Do not reproduce either. Aim the satire at power and its pomposity, not at faith, ethnicity, gender or the bodies of the powerless: the swollen head belongs to the leader. Remember too that caricaturing a Turkish head of state has repeatedly brought lawsuits.