For a man who some would call South Africa’s Robert Crumb, Anton Kannemeyer seems awfully normal. Talking to him, it’s easy to forget that he is one-half of the creative team behind one of the most politically incendiary and laceratingly irreverent graphic novels on the current scene. Nor apparently, has his more recent rise within the fine art world taken away from a genial and somewhat nerdy demeanor. He seems genuinely pleased to be doing the interview, and for my part, after being away from the region for so long, it’s just nice to talk to a southern African, whiteness notwithstanding.
The internationally acclaimed Bittercomix series is the result of a lengthy collaboration between Kannemeyer and fellow Afrikaner Conrad Botes, that coincided with the collapse of white supremacy in South Africa. Like any great artists, they are able to create something that is both intimately personal to the South African experience and simultaneously, universally recognized. Bittercomix has been described as a frontal assault on the Afrikaner culture, in all its insular, patriarchal conservatism, a ruthless dismembering of the South African myth, past and future. Kannemeyer spoke to COOL’EH about his childhood, his country, Bittercomix and the significance of Incredible Hulk #181 from a farm he describes as isolated, where he does the work that is currently finding it’s way into galleries in Europe and the US.



So, where in South Africa are you from?

I was born in Capetown, and my primary school…up till about twelve years old I was in Stellenbosch, sort of a University town. Very Afrikaner kind of background. And then from about twelve to eighteen I lived in Johannesburg, went to high school there. After that my mother married a German and I went to Germany for two years and then I came back to South Africa and I started studying, so in that sense, I’ve been around the country quite a bit.

What was the difference between growing up in Stellenbosch and growing up in Johannesburg? What caused the move?

It was really my father’s work. He was a university lecturer and he taught at Stellenbosch University and then he moved to JoBurg. During the time that I lived in Johannesburg, which was mid to late eighties, there were areas that were called, at the time, “gray areas” where blacks and whites were living and the National Party government at the time were sort of turning a blind eye to it. So Johnannesburg as opposed to Stellenbosch offered a wider array of cultural opportunities and things were a bit more relaxed there than in the more conservative parts of the country.

Are both your parents Afrikaaners?

My father is but my mother is Dutch actually, so in a sense I have been lucky to have this other influence as well. She divorced from my father when I was very young, about three years old, but I grew up with my father, which is kinda weird I suppose, because normally children would grow up with their mothers. But yeah, I grew up with my father and actually didn’t see my father until I was about eighteen years old.



That is pretty intense.

[laughs] Yeah, I think that is probably one of the biggest influences in my…sort of…I didn’t get along with my father either and from a very early age I actually very much hated him. He was very much kind of the embodiment of the white patriarch, pretty abusive, physically abusive and I actually haven’t spoken to him for thirteen years so we have grown completely apart. My father is a bit of a contradiction, on the one hand he was in the sort of Afrikaans literature, so he was exposed to literary environments and the University environment in general, which was more enlightened. On the other hand he very much made use of all the Apartheid structures that were in place to be very authoritative and, um…overbearing [laughs]. I don’t know quite how to…he was very apolitical. He just didn’t really care for politics, he always said to me that he didn’t think art needed to be at all political.

He doesn’t think it needs to be or he doesn’t think it should be?

He doesn’t think it needs to be. There was some political work that he did think was valid, but most work that was political he thought was opportunistic and not important, you know.

That’s pretty interesting considering what you do. And especially considering that at the time you were coming of age in South Africa, the region was a hotbed of political agitation and radical movements of all stripes. The Cold War certainly loomed large I imagine…

Ya, I think that during the seventies and eighties censorship in South Africa was pretty hectic. You didn’t have access to any information, look, for instance the death of Steve Biko. That was something my mother told me about when I was younger, I spoke to her on the phone once and she said that the French were very upset about the black South African who had been killed. It was only years later I made the connection that it must have been Steve Biko…I guess I was pretty much protected. One could argue that in South Africa you have a kind of “architecture of Apartheid” where all the roads sort of lead around the black settlements. For instance, if you’re driving into Johannesbourg, you can basically drive around Soweto and never really see it. Johannesburg is very visible but Soweto is very disguised and as a child you’re not really aware of all these structures around you. My immediate concern as a child was just the overbearing Apartheid regime that I think…maybe my youth was a bit like a Nazi youth. You grow up in a system where you have to do certain things, you march every day, there is one day during the school week where you put on Army clothes. These were all things that I and my brother were very opposed to, that we really didn’t want to do. My brother especially was really a rebel, he is two years older than me and I used to look at him and think maybe I should do things differently to not get into so much trouble. In South Africa, getting caned [corporal punishment] was pretty common and there was one episode when my brother was ten where he got six shots, which was pretty hectic, on the stage in front of the school. They wanted to make an example of him…it was a very cruel and brutal, male-dominated chauvinistic environment. In a sense, it was pretty much Victorian, it’s not much different from the English kind of school system but there was always this big element of fear growing up. But I don’t want to make it seem too terrible, obviously I know a lot of other people had much, much worse experiences as children. This was just how it was, and I didn’t react too positively I suppose.

So when you went to Germany, there must have been a lot of revelations

Yes, I would actually say I became more politically aware. My initial position on Apartheid was more in my own interest; I really didn’t want to go to the Army and that was one reason why I left the country. It was only once I was in Europe that certain things happened that made quite an impression on me. For instance, I remember traveling from Germany to Holland on my South African passport and I was on the train when the guy who checked the passports at the border took everybody’s passport and returned everyone’s except mine. And just before he closed the door he flung my passport in my face and it fell to the floor, everyone was looking at me, I was just humiliated. I knew what it was, I knew it was because I had a South African passport.



Was it a black guy?

No, no, it was a white guy, and I picked it up from the floor and just felt so completely exposed. It made a very strong impression on me. And the other thing is I remember after I had been in Europe for a few weeks I was invited to a rock concert by some new friends where I was staying. They said it was a Nelson Mandela concert and I never made any connection that it had anything to do with South Africa, then once I got there I was like “My God, it’s about South Africa and this Nelson Mandela guy” [laughs]…and in that sense I think I became much more politically aware there. There were other incidents; at one time I was working in a graphics agency as an apprentice, kind of, and there was a black guy there from England. I very much wanted to talk with him because I could speak English pretty well whereas with the German I was struggling. But I was so scared that he would find out I was from South Africa, the whole time I was afraid of people finding out I was South African, afraid of being exposed [laughs]. So after two years in Germany I decided to go back to South Africa to study, and obviously when I got back and went to school it had an influence.

Is this when Bittercomix started?

Yes, I started drawing Bittercomix with a friend of mine when we were in art school. Actually though, we didn’t start with the comic magazine, we did some stories that were mainly concerned with conscription…

Were you guys up for mandatory military service at the time?

Yes, yes, so we were called up every six months but because we were studying we automatically got an exemption. But if we would have failed a year or something then immediately you had to go.

Was this during the Angolan conflict? Were you even aware of the war in Angola at the time? I know that it was a covert operation at the time, publicly anyway, and I’m just curious if the prospect of dying in Angola loomed as large for your generation as Vietnam might have loomed for Americans in the early 70’s.

Well we were aware of [the war in Angola]. I had seen things on the news and a lot of young guys back from the army would talk about it, so we knew about Angola. The first concern was that we might get drafted; the losses on the South African side at that time were not as bad. I mean, one of my best friends at school got killed the year after he went into the army, so we were aware that that was an issue. Anytime you are in the military you are going to have to think about that, but the bigger concern was getting sucked into the system. I mean, some of my friends who returned from the army who were in Angola or Namibia, they were alcoholics by the time they got back. Serious alcoholics, not drinking beer and wine, they were drinking whisky and brandy, you know? I didn’t want to go because of the whole structure and the whole sort of thing you are going to get into. But the other thing was that from ’85 onwards our troops were used more and more to go into townships and essentially shoot at other South Africans. I think that became...you see, there was lots of ideological crap we were fed when we were at school and it actually made sense to fight in Angola because you were also fighting for America. America was our friend and Russia was the big foe, and that was why I think for lots of South Africans the war was justified. Then the Cold War came to an end and everything changed. It’s interesting how much the end of the Cold War changed things is South Africa as well.



I think you could say that for the whole continent, really. Joseph Mobutu held onto power for more than thirty years under the aegis of the Cold War…and a few years after it’s over he’s fleeing the country in ignominy.

It’s very interesting. I mean, UNITA in Angola…once they lost their western allies it was only a matter of time until they were finished.

So is this the climate that fostered Bittercomix?

Yes, well, I think the one thing about Bittercomix is that the first issue was published and contained stories from when we were in our second year, which was 1989 up to, say…1992. And then in 1992 it was published. So you know, basically in 1989 the National Party started to proceed with this five-year plan they had to hand power over to the ANC. So it is during this sort of climate of change that Bittercomix began and where we actually…people say now in retrospect that it showed a lot of what happened when Apartheid came to an end. The first ten years of democracy is kind of what it represents to a lot of people.

So how was this work being received? Was it something you shared with the faculty, what sort of responses were there?

[Conrad Botes] and I were very hardworking students and the fine arts department at the University of Stellenbosch was very open-minded, so there was a lot of support for the kind of things that we were doing. Also, at the time, nobody offered comic drawing in the department, there wasn’t such a course or anything even closely related to it. So we just sort of went on a trial and error basis…but I mean, I had been reading comics since I was very young and was very much into them. Conrad as well, I suppose. And also because of the fact that I went to Europe and I was pretty much aware of the French, the New Wave [stuff]. Also from America, Crumb was a big influence, although Crumb is a big influence for virtually anyone drawing comics today [laughs]. I was pretty cleared up on what was happening in the comic world and in a way, we sort of emulated the stuff we were seeing but with out own stories. It was received very positively in South Africa; a lot of people read the stories and were like wow it’s something that looks international but sort of reflects South African stories. But Bittercomix also wasn’t as provocative as it later became. The one thing that wont really be picked up on by foreigners is the way that we used language. Which is very pedestrian, very colloquial and in Afrikaans its not the kind of language that was written a lot. So in that sense I think a lot of young people felt that it reflected their kind of way of doing things or talking and their feelings towards the system that we came from. But in 1993 Conrad and I went to Holland and I was there for three months, he stayed for a year doing an illustration course. We obviously discovered all this porn and stuff, which, when I was eighteen in Germany, I didn’t pursue it. I guess I maybe wasn’t that interested, but coming from a South Africa where these sort of things were simply not allowed we very much went into this whole porn world. We made lots of drawings and made a publication that was very explicit, very pornographic but in Afrikaans, using very dirty, foul language. And making situations that were simply unacceptable before, especially black males having sex with white women. As you probably know there was a law prohibiting interracial sex in South Africa under Apartheid. Anyway, this really upset a lot of people, even people who thought Bittercomix was acceptable [before this], and all of a sudden we really polarized the readers of Bittercomix. You had people who absolutely loved it and you had people who absolutely hated it [laughs]. So this Afrikaner sex comic [Gif] was published in April 1994, the same month of the first democratic general election in South Africa’s history, and it was banned later that same year. We believe it was old structures in the government that managed to have it banned because under the new constitution it was very difficult to ban a magazine like that.



Was your reaction more pride or shock?

Initially we were pretty disturbed by it because all of a sudden the shop that sold our stuff called and said hey, is your book banned and we said no because we were never informed. Because in South Africa if something gets banned under the new constitution you have a certain amount of time to appeal and after that you have to pay a lot of money to get the case opened again. So we were never informed and couldn’t appeal by the time we heard, so all the magazines came back to us and we were like oh shit this is going to be a problem to sell. But what ended up happening was that all the art festivals we visited we just flogged them ourselves, and ended up selling a hell of a lot by hand because so many people were interested because of the banning. So now, it’s pretty remarkable to be one of the very few publications to be banned under the new Constitution and we also sold the entire print run.


So how did Bittercomix turn into everything you are doing now? What was the progression?

We started with the comic magazine and at the time we both did a lot of commercial work even though we were still studying. I did a lot of posters for alternative bands in Stellenbosch. At the time Stellenbosch became quite a hip, alternative, student culture…lots of people thinking anti-establishment. And this became a way for me to make money as I had become quite good at silkscreening by the time I finished studying. When we did Bittercomix we immediately thought, it’s a small black and white publication, no one is going to take it seriously and we don’t want it to fall through the cracks. So what Conrad and I did was to start making huge silkscreen prints of some pages, some of the covers, things like that. So what we would do was have a launch of the magazine and then have these huge color prints, which were quite impressive. And because we did that we had some galleries offer to exhibit some of our prints and eventually even some of our original work, so we have been very fortunate because we were almost stuck between the comic art world and the fine art world. As we progressed, the exhibitions became more and more popular, and we would have an exhibition and have a rock band play or whatever while also launching a new magazine. Around 1999, the exhibitions became very serious, then we started exhibiting in really major venues in the country and we put a lot of focus onto presenting very high quality color work. The other thing is, all our work is hand-done, not computer generated, everything is colored by hand. And this to me was quite important because the magazine didn’t make much money, but we could always sell prints and original artwork. I started teaching when I finished my masters, I was just teaching and making Bittercomix, and also was in charge of a comics festival in South Africa for a couple years but also exhibiting all the time. It was so much work that I decided to quit teaching. I started focusing on exhibiting in galleries, because that is actually a way of making a living.

What sort of comics did you read when you were young, what did you grow up with?

The American stuff was really appealing. Marvel certainly was the biggest part of my collection. Then I also had a bit of a European influence, Tintin, we also read Asterix and other stuff that was translated.



I was a big Marvel fan myself. It’s funny because looking at some of the stuff you do, I imagined those British comics of my childhood; Beano, Whizzer N’ Chips, might have been influences. I guess it’s the cutting irreverence and anti-establishment tone, although often in the service of nothing very substantive…

Yeah, yeah, there is a very strong satirical element in those magazines. I agree, I can see the connection, but…I always found the humor in those comics to be very…English, very quick, very witty. It didn’t really translate…I really think the British see comics as a children’s medium, you know. There are, of course, some English people who are different, but I think they don’t really take comics as a serious artform whereas I think that American’s do to a larger extent. And of course the French do. Therefore someone like Harvey Kurtzman at MAD magazine had real artistic integrity when he made it, and so it becomes something that runs much further and resonates much more.

What Marvel titles were you into?

You know, I had—actually still have—fairly large collections of X-Men, Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, Fantastic Four. I read anything I could get my hands on, swapped with friends and so on. The first comic that I remember buying and that I have kept all these years was Hulk #181, which is the first appearance of Wolverine. It’s just a coincidence, you know, it’s become very valuable and I bought it when I was twelve years old and never parted with it because I thought it was a very good comic. I was also very much into the Master of Kung Fu, Shang Chi, I still have every single issue of the whole series. The local [store] used to get maybe one or two copies of an issue, so if you didn’t get it [in time] then that was it.