Style combination · Contrasts
Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines × Underground Comix
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.
Mix them and make something Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines 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.
Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Underground Comix
- Type from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
- Colour from Underground Comix
- Form from Underground Comix
- Composition from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
- Surface from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
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Underground Comix avoids flat: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
Loud
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 · 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 Underground Comix, with a counter-accent from Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Underground Comix
-
#f1e9d4ground · 36% -
#141210ink · 14% -
#f2c12eaccent · 18% -
#d6262baccent · 14% -
#2f5ea8accent · 10% -
#c9307aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f1e9d4;
--ink: #141210;
--accent-1: #f2c12e;
--accent-2: #d6262b;
--accent-3: #2f5ea8;
--accent-4: #c9307a;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
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.
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 Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) Contrasts · Both are weekly humour magazines from a stable of cartoonists, with grotesque caricature in hand-lettered panels. Bruguera kept its satire of manners under children's slapstick for Franco's censors; the Turkish weeklies put named politicians on the cover every week and took the lawsuits that followed.
- Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Contrasts · Both are collectives' magazines that satirise power in street dialect and have been taken to court for it. The Arab magazines are small art-comics anthologies with no house style and no topical cover; the Turkish weeklies were mass newsstand titles built around one cover caricature of the week's news.
- ROSTA Windows Contrasts · Both turn the day's political news into hand-lettered satirical drawings for a mass audience. ROSTA stencilled numbered frames as agitation for the new state; the Turkish weeklies caricatured whoever held power, from Özal to Erdoğan, and were banned or sued for it.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Both lettered balloons by hand in capitals over cartoon figures for the newsstand, and Gırgır took its balloons and photomontage from Mad, which began in 1952 as Harvey Kurtzman's comic book for EC. The American comic book told serial adventures in four-colour letterpress; the Turkish weeklies built each issue around one topical caricature of the week's politics, then an anthology of signed gag corners.
- Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design Contrasts · Same city, same decades, opposite density: Istanbul's poster designers reduced a play or film to one flat idea on an open field, while the humour weeklies packed a cover with a caricature, balloons, headline band and price box. Borrow the poster's single idea to calm a crowded cover.
- Arab Children's Comic Magazines (Samir to Majid) Contrasts · The same weekly cartoon-magazine machine aimed at adults and at power: its swollen caricature and political covers show what the children's weeklies kept out.
- Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) Contrasts · 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.
- O Pasquim Satirical Press Pairs well · Another cartoonist-led weekly where satire and local idiom carry political commentary under pressure.
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.
- 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.
- 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.