ASIAN POLITICAL CARTOONS | By John A. Lent

Asian Political Cartoons is John Lent’s most recent contribution to a lifelong effort of documenting the global discourse of comics art. The book stands as a companion volume with his Asian Comics and Comics Art in China, also published by University of Mississippi Press. All three offer ambitious surveys of comic art based on more than 35 years of in-person interviews supplemented by a range of secondary sources—from scholarly publications to popular journalism and blogs. As with Lent’s previous two volumes, Asian Political Cartoons is colourful and encyclopedic: it includes several hundred illustrations, both monochrome and colour, along with dozens of photographs of the artists, and its orderly structure makes it easy to navigate. The book’s three main sections move from Japan to Iran, covering three sub-areas of Asia—East, Southeast, and South—with the countries and regions of each presented alphabetically across a total of 17 chapters and four briefer “vignettes.” The definition of the political cartoon is similarly inclusive. Lent looks at multiple platforms for cartooning, from magazines and newspapers to graphic novels, street art, and the Internet, focusing on cartoon art that criticizes, exposes, satirizes, and, less frequently, praises people, institutions, or events—often but not always with the goal of encouraging action or change.

To better reflect the diversity of political cartooning in these various countries and regions, Lent avoids imposing too rigid a structure on the individual chapters. Nearly all include a historical overview and a brief—usually one paragraph—conclusion, but the chapter subheadings vary so as to foreground key local artists, events, and platforms. Lent’s coverage of Malaysia, for example, features a contrast between two major cartoonists, Zunar and Lat, the former famous for bold attacks and the latter known for a subtle approach. The chapter on Taiwan, meanwhile, features a section on one of the island’s watershed political moments: the end of martial law in 1988. As for platforms, the chapter on South Korea includes a relatively extensive discussion detailing that country’s unique output of socially engaged graphic novels documenting events such as the repressed histories of comfort women, anti-communist repression, and corporate cover-ups of health disasters. In the case of Sri Lanka, Lent highlights the violent repression of cartoonists by supplementing his historical overview with detailed excerpts from a 1993 interview with Jiffry Yoonoos, who recounted for Lent his harrowing encounters with political terrorism under the Premadasa regime. The purpose in this instance, Lent emphasizes, is not just to make public the situation in Sri Lanka, but to point out that “what transpired in 1992 in Sri Lanka has and does occur elsewhere in other parts of Asia, globally, and most certainly still in Sri Lanka” (266).

As the Yoonoos story suggests, Asian Political Cartoons may be encyclopedic in format, but it has much more to offer than a conventional reference work. The book has a unifying focus, the “freedom to cartoon,” and presents a conclusion based on the results of Lent’s ambitiously globetrotting research. Recognizing the vast diversity of Asia, he cautiously refers to these findings as “common threads not necessarily tying everything together” (273). These threads include the presence of satirical art before the impact of colonization, the colonial-era  influence of expatriate humour and satire magazines imitating Punch and Puck, the use of political cartoons in independence movements, the near constant ebb and flow of the “freedom to cartoon,” government recognition of cartoonists in more recent times, and the prevalence of self-censorship and “guided cartooning,” the latter a condition under which the press allies itself with the government, thus becoming an unspoken agent of cartoon censorship. The book ends on a not entirely pessimistic note. On the one hand, Lent acknowledges the ongoing persecution and marginalization of political cartoonists in the face of legislative bans, unwritten rules, religious intolerance, and corporate interests; on the other, he reminds the reader that political cartoonists, broadly defined, will find new means to exercise their ingenious critiques as long as they see targets in government and society, which promises to be a very long time indeed.

Some readers will certainly note that Lent does not devote much space to discussing the concept of Asia itself. The subsection on “geographical dimensions” in the introduction adds up to three paragraphs, less than half a page. There Lent presents his definition of Asia and its subregions as based on that of the United Nations, and his selection criteria as determined by the locations he chose for his more than 200 interviews. Such a pragmatic approach allows for inclusivity, which in turn grounds Lent’s conclusions in an unprecedentedly extensive sampling of political cartoons and cartoonists. At the same time, one wonders how a book like this might have been structured otherwise depending on the position of its author. For instance, instead of starting from China and Japan, then proceeding south and east, would a British researcher have started in the former British colonies of South Asia and then headed west and north? And how would such a book have taken shape if compiled by an Asia-based researcher writing from a post-colonial position? Thought experiments like these do not by any means invalidate Lent’s conclusions, but they do caution against asserting any one authorial position as politically and historically neutral or natural. That said, it seems unlikely that we will ever see another treatment of political cartooning in Asia as comprehensive and accessible as Lent’s. Asian Political Cartoons will remain an essential reference for the cartoon researcher and cartoon enthusiast alike for many years to come.

John Crespi

Colgate University, Hamilton