Asian Political Cartoons

John Lent is the preeminent scholar on the art, dissemination, readership, and impact of comics and cartooning in different cultures and global sites of this recalcitrant art form of graphical commentary. Lent is also the publisher and editor in chief of the International Journal of Comic Art, which many in the comics studies field hold in high regard. His history of engagements with the majority of Asian region's prominent cartoonists is collected in his latest book, Asian Political Cartoons. Lent initially grounds this volume by stating that the book is organized by the geographical segmentation of what “Asia” is, which is a way of corralling the contents, which serve as a collection of Asian cartoonists deemed by Lent as crucial to their country's newspaper industry. Lent's latest book serves as a credible primer on who's who in Asian cartooning, providing an encyclopedic take on cartooning as a practice in Asia as compared to a thematic intersection of forms and contexts to create “Asia”1 or a focus of cartooning from external forces of colonialism to emerge an image of nation.2 Lent's self-imposed limited scope does not give space for investigation as to how cartooning is curtailed or recast to suit the rising militancy and strengthening authoritarianism of Asia.It is notable that the selected cartoonists in this book are contacts of his from across the decades.3 These names are recognized and venerated, such as Malaysia's Lat, who created comics on the nostalgia for the Malaysian nation via the idyllic kampung, or village, and this is perhaps a version of cartooning as seen from the point of view of privilege, for these featured cartoonists are mostly from broadsheets that are “allowed” by the authorities to be visible for periods of time. Given the gradual disappearance of print media, many of these cartoonists are dated and are portrayed as being in danger of being ossified in a particular historical moment that may not be quite as resonant today when the internet and memes have democratized political visual satire to those without newspaper support. Though the cartoons of the seemingly grand older generations of cartoonists are important, their belonging to traditional print media may be seen to reduce their capacity to disrupt or be relevant and resonant in these days of diminishing support. In the case of the Philippines, Lent invokes Nonoy Marcelo's (156) works (admittedly vital for Filipino comics studies historians), but few (if any) readers are familiar with his work in this day and age. Marcelo has been dead for close to twenty years. His works, particularly Ikabod, were critical of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. This should prove to be a great, vital point of investigation into how comic strips are “present” in defiance but are then forgotten or disposed of easily in light of the return of the Marcoses to the presidential palace in 2022. This book sees many episodes regarding graphic satire and memory, but with an archival, indexical approach. Another herculean task would investigate culture, humor, and memory. Nonetheless, Lent offers glimpses into how cartoons were influential then but are tapering off now. This is a result of what Lent writes as “setbacks” that “almost all Asian political cartooning faces hard times and a bleak future. In recent years, new and reconfigured old policies, modi operandi, and philosophies have made the careers of many political cartoonists marginal at best and impossible at worst” (274). If one takes a look at Southeast Asia's geopolitical tensions, newspaper cartoons are almost spectral in the sense that they are ghostlike, still lingering and trying to gain a foothold in popular discussion. Lent's book offers both nostalgia and perhaps a lament for a steady and gradual fading of the traditional political cartoon. Lent writes about how Vietnamese cartoonists would have to overcome some hurdles: “Political cartoons commonly perceived as drawings critical of the political and societal situation of a country are nearly nonexistent or cleverly hidden in today's Vietnam. One veteran cartoonist proudly showed me some of his drawings that were hard-hitting, well-executed pieces of satire—truly political cartoons—but he dampened the spirit of the moment by saying that they were posted on Facebook solely for his friends” (198).In another example of a different socioeconomic condition differing from Vietnam—namely, Japan, which has a robust economy and a relatively stronger democratic approach to publication (compared with China)—Lent writes, “In the decades since the 1990s, the state of Japan's political cartooning has increasingly deteriorated. The statistics tell the story. The big three newspapers (Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, and Mainichi Shimbun) reduced the weekly number of political cartoons they printed, initially in their evening editions” (47–48). This reduction of the presence of political cartoons in print media can be seen in the Philippines, where the biggest broadsheets such as the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star have stopped publishing editorial cartoons.There are a handful of women in the mix: their limited involvement in cartooning in Asia warrants further scrutiny of the gendered performance of humor. It must be said that these days, on the internet, there is an ample presence of women cartoonists. Current technology has given access to abilities to render stronger punchlines and more virulent commentary that many traditional cartoonists could not publish in broadsheet media. Though this relates to mapmaking, cartoons are not only markers of temporality but also indicators of spatiality and notions of nation for the cartoonists. Many will find this book vital for its collection of cartoonists’ styles, visuality, and practice, and of pieces of their country's history. Granted, the book is a testament to the ossification of mainstream graphic satire, whose visibility is reliant on broadsheets backed by mostly private interests or by government-owned media. For political cartoon enthusiasts such as this reviewer, there is a fear that in light of the diminishing of printed newspapers, the book serves as a future fossil or an encapsulation of fossils when the virulence of pen and ink has taken flight into the online world of likes and scrolls. Lent does present at the end of the chapters a series of discussions of the different emergent voices and technology in graphic satire. Yet, although the book includes the nascent beginnings of political cartooning in the region, this is still focused on the older generations of cartoonists.There are conversations that are cynical and portentous: Filipino cartoonist Roni Santiago says that despite his decades of being a cartoonist, the issues remain the same. Several entries have been recast from Lent's previous essays. Though this may be an organized take on cartoonists and their practice, Lent's insistence on tying it to Asia as geography misses a crucial opportunity to see cartoons as a network of insights into how Asia is imagined by cartoons. After all, Asia itself is a colonial utterance, and many of the countries have emerged as former colonies. Cartooning is a vestige of such colonial legacies for many of these nations. While Lent is adamant on clean segmentation, perhaps this can be a call to one of his adherents to extend this book into an investigation of “cartographic bricolage, . . . the cumulative process of map fabrication. Maps, in their technical power to depict a seamless unity and wholeness, conceal the fact that they are created from fractured, contradictory, and mobile elements.”4This demonstrates the Sisyphean nature of political cartoons in the region where symbols have been churned out and have been recast, reused, and recycled because of the protracted nature of the problems of Asia. The conversations are the most important part of the book, for these are thoughts from cartoonists tantamount to monuments of a fading era. Many of the cartoons in this book are shown in their interstitial points between being a colony and emerging as a nation-state, between developing as a nation and becoming a global power. With these shifts, the cartoon has remained mostly constant as vital in reaching out to the masses—particularly in the case of China and its many violent shifts in history. Among the nations in this book, China proves to be the most massive and interesting in its developments of comics due to changes in approaches of comics as defiance against Japanese imperialism (18), due to Maoist propaganda (20), and due to its eventual participation in the global economy in producing possible export products via cartoons and comics (21). These cartoons are witnesses to the fortification and the sundering of societies in light of Asia's cyclical fascisms and authoritarian episodes. The cartoons are markers of the tenuous nature of “democracy” and how “Asia” is seen/segmented. This book is an almost clinical organization of past political cartoons to a certain depth that should offer the more discerning reader insight into the many signs auguring a more rambunctious cartooning online by younger political cartoonists.