Text - Rhodes University

ways of creating this entrance point are used in the ccomics examined above. They are
similar methods, utilising opposite means, and are based on a distinction between the
verbal text and the artwork. Many grades of variation exist between these two poles. If
the story is conventional, the artwork can be less so, and vice versa. The skill lies in
maintaining a balance, and thus a mean of intelligibility. 'The magic of the strip is not
so much in what it says, but in how it says it." (Watterson, 1990, p.2)
Yet, however interesting and important these comics are to the people who produce them
and the people who have "never seen anything like this before", they remain irrelevant
to the commercial publishers of comics. For all the bluster about challenging mainstream
mores and redefining categories of art, South African undergrounds are still teenage
indulgences. If, in twenty years' time, one of the artists is producing graphic novels, or if
the great South African comic emerges from these beginnings, other significances can be
attributed, with hindsight, to these publications. The challenge to these artists is to retain
a memory of their stubborn beginnings as they become more adept at producing
mainstream comics. Substitute "comics" for "samplers" in the following quotation:
"So often, the cry goes up that 'everybody' is 'out there' fooling around with
their cheap samplers, thus constituting a 'groundswell'; But even if they are,
so what? Are the pavements cracking? Is a state of collapse iminent?
Samplers will certainly not be suppressed by the music industry." (Reynolds,
1990, p. 171)
The importance, if any, of these comics lies in their possibilities. Reynolds expresses the
intentions of the artists succinctly:
"With the music [or comics] we like, it doesn't matter if it doesn't
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