Bitterkomix – Sketchbooks & Journals

In mathematics, to ‘show your work’ means to demonstrate how you got to a solution. Showing your work is just as applicable to Bitterkomix Sketchbooks and Journals, a deeply personal collection of drawings from Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer. The collection lifts the skirt on how the duo behind Bitterkomix, South Africa’s most infamous satirical comic, do what they do.

Divided into three sections, the book features drawings cherrypicked from approximately 120 different sketchbooks and journals. From when Botes and Kannemeyer first started working in sketchbooks at school to their university years, when their practice became more serious. From Bitterkomix fame to their work as fine artists. These sketchbooks and journals reveal the process, the progress and the problem solving behind decades’ worth of work from a duo often pigeonholed, by both the right and the left, as the bad boys of South African art.

While this collection contains a good dose of their customary attacks on power, hypocrisy, censorship and groupthink (topics more relevant than ever today), in Bitterkomix Sketchbooks and Journals the viewer gets to see the evolution – warts, mistakes, re-workings and all – of a breathtaking array of drawings. Some subjects are repeated, others shared, as Anton and Conrad collaborated through the years, both as remarkably long-standing creative partners and great friends.