I wrote this for the the fifth issue of Kuti, since that came out already half a year ago, i thought it was fair I could it also put on my site.
My father used to edit the magazine for the Freethinker parents who sent their children to state school as to avoid religious classes in school. For some bizarre reason he always received press copies of children's books to review in the magazine even though that was barely a black and white photocopied rag with a print run of 50. There was a drawer in my father's workdesk where me and my sister would always be snooping in to find the latest book he had gotten. I still remember this one time where there was not a nice looking book there but a hardcover comic book. After opening and browsing through it, I had, what you might call an epiphany: "this was a comic not meant for children"; a concept that i was completely unaware of. It came as a complete shock and i had no idea what to do with that information. In fact, it kind of scared me. I must have been 13 years old or so. I had grown up reading sappy children's comics in which nobody ever gets hurt and the bad guys inevitably loose the battle and then repent. What i had in front of me did not fit in that universe at all. Where was the slapstick humour? Whatever happened to the abstract clearline childfriendly drawings? I especially remember this shortstory about this fat guy who goes into the supermarkt and starts grossing out in the store, stuffing himself with saucages and pates from the meatcounter, and the slugging down liters of wine. It really grossed me out. The next week i took the book to school (which by the way was Boucq's Pédagogie du trottoir) and proudly showed it to my friends and acted all worldly about it.
My second epiphany concerning comics came when i was helping to start up a comic magazine at the incredibly naieve young age of 19. We were having a first time get together with all the interested parties. Talks inevitably concentrated on what we now really wanted to do. Then somebody stood up and grabbed something from his bag and asked "Why don't we try to do something like THIS?" In his hands he held a comic magazine called Bitterkomix (subtitled "pulp for dimwits"). This magazine was as exotically made as it sounded "an underground comic magazine from South-Africa" After reading it, i was completely floored. These were not stories that tried to please people esthetically nor intellectually. It was weird and above all, mean. Later on in life i found the perfect wording to describe the reading experience. "No other comics publication ever made me feel like i was participating in something subversive and wonderful simply by reading it."(*)
That particular issue of Bitterkomix that my friend was showing contained a superb one pager that somehow captured the repressed state of mind of South-Africa. You see Tintin walking into a bar where he orders a beer from the black bartender. He tries to avoid conversation with the guy by switching languages but it fails three times in a row. The story ends with this "I blushed, panicked and replied that I don't speak Dutch, even though I am Dutch, and that I've been living in Germany ever since I can remember, determined not to tell him about my 17 years as a privileged white South-African. As he left he shouted "I don't care where you come from, man. I love you!" I don't really know why this made such an impact on me but it is somehow engraved in my memory.
Tin Tin, as a matter of fact, is a recurring figure in the Bitterkomix magazine. He is somewhat the embodiment of a wholesome all white South-African boyhood. Superbly drawn in a clear line style Joe Dog (one of the two main artists behind Bitterkomix) would use the Tintin figure to tell stories about incest or the fear of a black uprising (that particular story was also published in the Comix2000 anthology). The combination of the typical Hergé drawing style, childhood memories of a white south-african artist and Tintins openly racist content create a uniqueness to these stories that is as urgent and powerful as it can get.
The other talented artist of Bitterkomix is Conrad Botes. He seems to populate his stories with power obsessed men (with beards usually) who laugh demonically at the sight of their own wrongdoings, Apparently the sad history fo South-African colonisation is filled with characters like that. With his lush brush strokes and black ink abundance he thus radically rewrites Afrikaner history.
Reading in Afrikaans was yet another factor that made Bitterkomix so appealing to me. Since Afrikaans descended from the language of farmers 50km north of my hometown, reading and deciphering Bitterkomix is like listening to your grandmother speak in hardcore dialect. It takes a while to get into the flow of that and sometimes the only way to understand the language was to imagine how my uncle would say it. After that i would usually get it. By studying the text balloons in Bitterkomix i was actually learning a language. I even put Afrikaans on my CV under "language skills" but took it off when one possible employee started asking questions about it.
Afrikaans is very suspicious towards new words and any intrusion of english is very much frowned upon. The stories in Bitterkomix use spoken language and contain a lot of English loan words. In the second issue of the magazine an outraged reader who had picked up the publication at his doctor's waiting room wished that the Bitterkomix editors would have paid more attention in school so that they would have learned something about language purity. He then continues to write that their magazine should belong to the pile of porn withheld by the censorship board. He ends the letter by appealing to the editors integrity and to be more responsible with what they publish so that the youth of today would be spared of this smut. As you can imagine reading these hate letters (on average one per magazine) are an integral part of the fun.
Of course it's not all brilliant and sophisticated. The obsession with sex gets on the nerves quite easily, even though it is on a rare occasion funny (a guy jerks off on his face to use his sperm as shaving cream because "real farmer boys only use cum to shave") Since Bitterkomix wanted to break with suppressed lutheran thinking about sex, the depicted scenes are generally very much over the top and have nothing more to offer then shock value. When recently asked about the future of Bitterkomix and "Is sex an obsession or will the new Bitterkomix show fewer private parts? ", Botes simply answered: "I wouldn't want to disappoint my audience."
Bitterkomix is a magazine that put out it's first issue in 1992, which is 2 years before Apartheid was completely dismantled and when censorship was still very much a factor in the cultural landscape. It is still around, just having published it's 14th issue and clocking out one issue per year since 1998. Most of the art is done by Joe Dog and Conrad Botes but there are other contributors as well. The main language is Afrikaans with the occasional english piece. There are two Best of books in English and one Bitterkomix arts book ("the big bad handbook of bitterkomix"). I suggest you go find their stuff.
(*)Quoted from Tom Spurgeon but i can't retrace the actual source, maybe somebody else has more perseverance can look here.
