Text - Rhodes University

Text shifts between narrative, speech or soundeffect functions, without visual cues as to
these functions, thus further destabilising the structure of the comic. Interest is added to
the comic at the expense of clarity. An overall flatness is created by background and
foreground vying for attention; characters do not exist within an environment but are
placed on top of decoration. This reduces them almost to the substance of similar
decoration [fig 36].
/I lIlt/iY !VICE 130r
~~--------~~ro~~
Figure 36 Breytenbach Nothing in Common pI (reduced)
The links between frames are tenuous,and they become a varied series of pictures.
Nothing in Common looks like a comic, but does not behave like one.
Sorfa's one-pager Total Disintegration of A is a personal joke, as already mentioned [see
fig 1]. It is notable because he combines the two styles favoured by Komiksoc: traditional
action-to-action frames on the righthand side of the page, and on the lefthand side,
drawing with comments.
The Killing of Bunion would be more surreal to an outsider than to the people involved.
But part of the ethos of underground comics is the celebration of the personal over
fantasy, producing work about a community for consumption by that community, however
small it is. The characters are cartoons of real people [fig 37]; my characters, although
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