Cover of the satirical comics magazine ‘Bitterkomix’
It’s amazing to think that the satirical comics magazine Bitterkomix is still going 31 years after it first emerged. That’s longer than the ANC has been in power, writes Shaun de Waal in his review of Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer’s latest collection of comic-style works, Bitterkomix 19.
One might have thought that comics and satire are relatively ephemeral – the former because they are a “popular” form and popular tastes change, the latter because it tends to be linked to the events, ideologies and prominent personalities of the day, and thus can lose its immediate relevance.
Still, here we are: the 19th volume of Bitterkomix came out this year, and it prods and pokes as much as ever it did. But now, to my mind at least, the context has changed, so the meanings one attaches to or extracts from such work are different, even troubled. And that, indeed, gives rise to the difficulty at the heart of this new collection of comic-style works by Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog).
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