"Our Beer is Better Than Theirs": Sub-cultural Comics as a Joking Relationship with Identity

Abstract

Many music-related subcultures have their own printed media known as fanzines. These journals often include comics, drawn by amateur artists who belong to the same subculture. In my article I will focus on the comics in German reggae and punk fanzines. I am going to demonstrate that besides entertain- ment and fun, these comics also entail a wide range of political, social and cultural messages as well as attempts to define the subculture's identity. Punk/ skinhead-comics often discuss political issues, criticize certain features of punk culture (like local patriotism), but also raise issues such as commercialization. Reggae-fanzines focus very often on stressing certain cultural traits like the use of colloquial language, behaviour patterns and dress code which are considered essential to being part of that subculture. Considering the joking, the paper reveals that similarly to South African tribes, the humour of punk and reggae fanzines hides very serious social, political and cultural issues. In this paper I want to discuss comics of the German reggae and skinhead subculture and look how they link with the confirmation and building of sub- cultural identities. I want to display that in the analysis of sub-cultural comics we can use concepts of the joking relationship, and also lean on the concept of trickster from classical anthropological theory. In researching literature for this paper I searched academic databases to find out what has been published about subcultures' comics. Using key words like subculture, sub-cultural, cartoon and comic(s) I found literally nothing that could have been useful for my own paper. Most results I received were about the subculture of comics, i.e. comic fans' subcultures. For example, there are studies about how comic fans copy the dress and behaviour of their comic heroes (e.g. Tsutsui 2008). I do not want to argue that no research has been done about comics of subcultures but I was not able to locate examples. It shows that scholars of cultural studies, subculture studies or sociology work-