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the first generation whose world is more strongly influenced by commercial media than fine art or literature. Their cultural milieu is more visual than verbal- radio, newspapers, books and magazines are substantially different in texture from television, computers and videos or films. (Novels do not break for advertisements, nor does radio have trailers.) So inevitably comic artists are faced with a problem of language. "Burning with an inferiority complex towards the 'high' culture in whose discourse they are themselves fluent, their overwheening concern is to validate pop culture." (Reynolds, 1990, p.lO) Working in a medium understood by their peers, they are then confronted with the problem of integrating a fine art training and understanding into the preset rules of a commercial medium. A new language, or perhaps just a dialect, must evolve. The more obviously poetic, less narrative stories were rejected by peers as being incomprehensible, contrived and 'arty'. To an uncertain artist or writer, contrived obscurity can seem to enhance the importance and profundity of their work. What Bitterkomix understood from the beginning is the fine balance that must be maintained; comics are not a new medium, they have a solid history of development, and only with a thorough understanding of this can diversions then be introduced. To blatantly work within the comic medium is to accept comic conventions; rejection, if necessary, follows after that. Differences from standard comics are as important and telling and useful as any other aspect, especially as comic audiences are alert to any such deviations. 156
Even more than painters or writers, comic artists work with the intangible: the gap between the frames, the reality behind the drawings, the sound behind the lettering. They juggle and manipulate this unreal dimension, and that is the magic that makes one comic better than another. The comics that fail may use the same genres, tools, techniques, even be drawn better. But if the artist deals primarily with what is on the page rather than what is not, the comic disintegrates into writing and drawing, remaining static. This appreciation of the unreal dimension, the virtual reality that is derived from the work, that the work is only a diagram of, is ingrained in the fantasyland of popular culture. It is second nature for a mediawise audience to suspend disbelief, to fill in the bits, to interpret for themselves, not just in an approach to art, but in everyday communication; to read the advertisement as it is meant to be read, and then as it is not meant to be read. The popularity of David Lynch's films (a self-acknowledged influence on Bitterkomix) is due to this understanding: that there are always at least two levels to be apprehended, neither of which are can be separated from the traditional "meaning of the text". Lynch deals with this by injecting a familiar, ordinary surreality into his work. In film, such intentions often need to be overstated, because the pitfalls of believing what-yousee-is-real must be avoided. Comics do not have this problem. Comic frames cannot be mistaken for verbatim accounts of reality. Photostories, which one would expect to be more realistic, are less so. The intrusion of speech bubbles and captions are more strongly felt, so that the comic does not become an unreal whole reality. Photographs also in fact seem more lifeless than drawn comics because movement cannot be depicted as it can in a comic drawing. Obviously, the reader's response is a consideration if the comic is intended for print. However personal the artist's vision, there should always be an "in" for a reader. Two 157
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A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SOUTH AFRICA
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dialect differs from the language o
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"Does he paint? He fain would write
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1. INTRODUCTION What I am attemptin
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existence ... until food gets short
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is making comics respectable in the
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Most of these comics are produced a
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2. DEFINITIONS AND TERMINOLOGY The
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In addition, extraverbal sounds, or
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The decision as to whether visual l
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For the first two decades of the tw
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Wertham's book The Seduction of the
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Undergrounds were amoral, sexual, s
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coalesced into comics intended for
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3. ANALYSIS Four different groups o
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incomprehensible passages are incom
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positive shapes, even or especially
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3.2. KOMIKSOC The confessional aspe
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,0 ::l£~) \e B . f"'CM P'!~t .....
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Figure 2 Franklin After the Plagues
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Sididis's Tripping uses comic conve
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example of how the appearance of a
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M\..I.A i H !lVIE ou~ rut", """" ""
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The artist only solves this problem
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text. Yet the frames function in su
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of the text, which is the reason fo
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omb) are lost in an attempt at pers
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a single emotion, depicting various
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Figure 19 Breytenbach Eddie Jumped
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Content is sometimes allowed to esc
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Sorfa's technique saves, lives up t
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Figure 23 Casey Showcase: Item 1 pI
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Two people, a scriptwriter and an a
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Sorfa's collaboration with scriptwr
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Casey's understanding of blacks and
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From the whimsical, poetic scripts
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This same regularity forces pace to
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In previous comics, my 'visual writ
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The comic was drawn full-size on A4
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Text shifts between narrative, spee
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Teo iNTE.N5E · Figure 38 Sorfa Spi
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' .. Figure 1 T. Begg The Battle of
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The text of Bone Staircase, by Freu
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of solid blacks and a subjective vi
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Rue, by Sididis, begins well. The f
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completely resolved. Possibly his p
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seems to pick out elements, without
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The awkwardness of this comic is a
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3.4. BI'ITERKOMIX Bitterkomix start
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From Case No. 308, the story of Tom
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Figure 3 Botes, Dog The Tommy Saga:
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'Tj ~. (1) ..,. tj o OQ ;l ,(1) VEI
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etween form and content, but also p
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Another example is figure 8, from A
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structured. Familiar sources, conte
Page 112 and 113: Some verbal comic conventions are m
Page 114 and 115: Both artists make use of a great va
Page 116 and 117: character, Chico D, into a martyr a
Page 118 and 119: Figure 17 Van Zyl Die Besoek p5 112
Page 120 and 121: The transitions between panels are
Page 122 and 123: simply by its silence and inexplica
Page 124 and 125: Figure 22 Botes Die Mens 118
Page 126 and 127: Verdwaalde Harte [fig 23J, also by
Page 128 and 129: Figure 27 Dog, Winterbach Rewerie p
Page 130 and 131: In Die Hero van die Bitch [fig 29],
Page 132 and 133: draws the reader's attention to the
Page 134 and 135: Figure 32 Bates Siembamba 128
Page 136 and 137: The Proverbs are selected and reint
Page 138 and 139: In Klapmuts Polisie Slaan Toe, Bote
Page 140 and 141: Ina van Zyl is more concerned with
Page 142 and 143: I ROSIE is NUUT deur Ina van ;Zyl I
Page 144 and 145: M y DEliO !r1OTHER H I..4NG UP I LE
Page 146 and 147: Botes is very good at acidic social
Page 148 and 149: The second episode of Missileman, b
Page 150 and 151: In Kanker Botes' subject is again t
Page 152 and 153: coincides with the appearance of th
Page 154 and 155: closeup, then pulls away to explain
Page 156 and 157: stories in issue 1 are in English,
Page 158 and 159: 4. CONCLUSION The comics are all pr
Page 160 and 161: The most common genres (my definiti
Page 164 and 165: ways of creating this entrance poin
Page 166 and 167: S. BIBLIOGRAPHY BARKER, M. 1989. Co
Page 168: Thames and Hudson. NEAL, C. 1987. T
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