Text - Rhodes University

3.4. BI'ITERKOMIX
Bitterkomix started in 1992 with two contributors, Conrad Botes and Joe Dog (Anton
Kannemeyer), who worked closely together. Only gradually did they incorporate work by
others into their publication. Being part of a more coherent movement in popular culture,
that of Afrikaans pop music, the comics progressed quickly to an accepted level of
professionalism. Their overt intention was never exclusively to experiment with comics
as a medium, but rather to produce an Afrikaans comic. They are as concerned with
content as with form - a combination that appears only later in Komiksoc's work. As a
result, Bitterkomix are the most formal and in some ways also the most conservative
artists examined in this sample. They have a great deal of respect for comics tradition,
and a thorough knowledge of it.
Returning briefly to the matter of terminology, Bitterkomix translate comics as 'komix',
not 'strokiesprente' or even 'strips', which is the Dutch and often the preferred Afrikaans
term. In this choice they explicitly acknowledge a debt to much previous graphic
literature, both the English-language tradition of comics and more narrowly the American
underground comix of the sixties.
Bitterkomix set themselves up, in plots and editorial, as oppositional and subversive. They
are the most traditionally 'underground' of the artists discussed. Following influences like
Robert Crumb, one of the leaders in American underground comix, the content of stories
is subversive, while the style is fairly conventional.
Discussion of the four issues of Bitterkomix deals first with issues one and two, and then
with issues three and four, in order to clearly demonstrate the gradual development of
th e artis ts.
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