John A. Lent

Lorna Fitzsimmons

Popular Culture in Asia consists studies of film, music, architecture, television, and computer-mediated communication in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore, addressing three topics: urban modernities; modernity, celebrity, and fan culture; and memory and modernity.

Memory, City, Celebrity

Popular Culture in Asia

In Asian Political Cartoons, scholar John A. Lent explores the history and contemporary status of political cartooning in Asia, including East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, North and South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), and South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). Incorporating hundreds of interviews, as well as textual analysis of cartoons; observation of workplaces, companies, and cartoonists at work; and historical research, Lent offers not only the first such survey in English, but the most complete and detailed in any language. Richly illustrated, this volume brings much-needed attention to the political cartoons of a region that has accelerated faster and more expansively economically, culturally, and in other ways than perhaps any other part of the world. Emphasizing the “freedom to cartoon," the author examines political cartoons that attempt to expose, bring attention to, blame or condemn, satirically mock, and caricaturize problems and their perpetrators. Lent presents readers a pioneering survey of such political cartooning in twenty-two countries and territories, studying aspects of professionalism, cartoonists’ work environments, philosophies and influences, the state of newspaper and magazine industries, the state’s roles in political cartooning, modern technology, and other issues facing political cartoonists. Asian Political Cartoons encompasses topics such as political and social satire in Asia during ancient times, humor/cartoon magazines established by Western colonists, and propaganda cartoons employed in independence campaigns. The volume also explores stumbling blocks contemporary cartoonists must hurdle, including new or beefed-up restrictions and regulations, a dwindling number of publishing venues, protected vested interests of conglomerate-owned media, and political correctness gone awry. In these pages, cartoonists recount intriguing ways they cope with restrictions—through layered hidden messages, by using other platforms, and finding unique means to use cartooning to make a living.

Asian Political Cartoons

K. Mulliner

Archaeology, Historiography, Geography, and Bibliography

Malaysian Studies

Emphasizes the contemporary mass media of the Commonwealth Caribbean and the societies in which they function, explaining their characteristics and practices in terms of the history of the region and the media themselves and relating these traits, wherever applicable, to theories of communication and national development. Illustrated.

The Case of Commonwealth Caribbean, 1717-1976

Third World Mass Media and Their Search for Modernity

This is the first overview of cartoon art in this important cultural nexus of Asia. The eight essays provide historical and contemporary examinations of cartoons and comics in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and sociocultural and political analyses of cartooning in Singapore, Myanmar, and Malaysia. The collection benefits from hundreds of interviews with Southeast Asia's major cartoonists, conducted by the four contributors, as well as textual analyses of specific cartoons, on-the-spot observations, and close scrutiny of historical documents. All genres of printed cartoon art are studied, including political and humor cartoons, newspaper comic strips, comic books, and humor and cartoon periodicals. Topics of discussion and comparison with cartoon art of other parts of the globe include national identity, the transnational public sphere, globalization, alternative media forms, freedom of expression, consumerism, and corporatism. Southeast Asian cartoon art has a number of features unique to the region, such as having as pioneering cartoonists three countries' founding fathers, comics that gave their name to a national trait, some of the earliest graphic novels worldwide, and a king who hired a cartoonist to illustrate his books.

History, Trends and Problems

Southeast Asian Cartoon Art

Wendy Siuyi Wong

Benjamin Wai–ming Ng

This book explores various aspects of transnationalism and comics art in six East Asian and seven Southeast Asian countries/territories. The 14 richly illustrated chapters embrace comics, cartoons, and animation relative to offshore production, transnational ownership, multinational collaboration, border crossings of comics art creators and characters, expansion of overseas markets, cartoonists in political exile, colonial underpinnings, adaptation of foreign styles and formats, representation of other cultures, and more. Using case studies, historical accounts, descriptive overviews, individual artists’ profiles, and representational analyses, and fascinatingly told through techniques as document use, interviews, observation, and textual analyses, the end result is a thorough, interesting, and compact volume on transnationalism and comics art in East and Southeast Asia.

Transnationalism in East and Southeast Asian Comics Art

"This volume documents from historical and contemporary perspectives, the situations, trends, and issues of cartooning in a number of African countries, and profiles the individuals, forms, and phenomena that stand out. All types of cartooning are covered, including comic books, comic strips, gag and political cartoons, and humor magazines. The contributors are scholars, writers, and practitioners of comic art who are either residents of or research visitors to Africa. Their approaches run the gamut from historical/contemporary overviews, to problem analysis of the profession and cartoonists, to textual analysis."--BOOK JACKET.

Cartooning in Africa

The Asian Film Industry

Today, comic art is the favorite reading fare for millions of Asians, and is a government-sanctioned, value-added product, as in the case of Korean and Japanese animation. Yet not much is known about Asian cartooning. Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning uses overviews and case studies by scholars to discuss Asian animation, humor magazines, gag cartoons, comic strips, and comic books. The first half of the book looks at contents and audiences of Malay humor magazines, cultural labor in Korean animation, the reception of Aladdin in Islamic Southeast Asia, and a Singaporean comic book as a reflection of that society’s personality. Four other chapters treat gender and Asian comics, concentrating on Japanese anime and manga and Indian comic books.

Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy

Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning

Hugo D. Yonzon

When cartoons and comics sprouted in the country at the turn of the 20th century, the populace was just beginning to read after being kept for years by the Spanish colonizers from the illumination of literacy. The American occupiers brought public education and, by consequence, a freer discourse. There was an explosion of expression that remains to be contained up to this day. The repressed exuberance of the Filipinos exhibited itself in politics, entertainment, and media. The Philippines is a young country and may not have a deep and complex history like Japan that has its emaki and kibyõshi dating back to the late 18th century, very readable materials replete with drawings that are said to be the forerunners of manga or comics. But in 1821, the Philippines had Ilocano painter Esteban Villanueva depicting the Basi Revolt in vivid sequential paintings like storytelling in comics. Although those paintings, considered the first historical ones in Southeast Asia, probably do not count because they were not printed on paper and publicly disseminated. --Amazon.com

The First One Hundred Years of Philippine Komiks and Cartoons

The campaign in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s to rid comic books of their violent content, and often-times to obliterate the medium itself, had far-reaching and deeply felt reverberations. Spearheaded by moralists, educators, politicians, and psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, anti-comics crusades led to book burnings, town meetings, periodical discourses, and the draconian Comics Code, recognized as the most oppressive act of self-censorship in this country's history. At issue was the possible link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, although then-current concerns about communist infiltration, lowered educational levels, and moral decay also crept into the arguments.

International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-comics Campaign

Pulp Demons

Animation has had a global renaissance during the 1990s, and nowhere is this more evident than in Asia. With the exception of China and Japan, most Asian nations are relatively new to this art form. Over the last decade, countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand, as well as China, have acted as major offshore production plants for North American and European studios. One of the spurs for this increase in activity has been the global growth of terrestrial, cable, satellite, and video systems, all demanding large menus of programming, including animation. A second spur has been the exceptional popularity that Japanese animé has enjoyed across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Despite these developments, there has not been corresponding growth of a serious literature covering industrial and aesthetic issues about Asian animation, and the small amount of work that has been produced has not been published in English. Animation in Asia and the Pacific provides the first continent-wide analysis, delving into issues of production, distribution, exhibition, aesthetics, and regulation in this burgeoning field. Animation in Asia and the Pacific also offers vignettes of the fascinating experiences of a group of animation pioneers. The historical and contemporary perspectives derive from interviews, textual analysis, archival research, and participation/observation data.

Animation in Asia and the Pacific

The fourth title in Lent's definitive bibliography of comic art worldwide--the series includes over 30,000 citations.

A Comprehensive, International Bibliography

Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America

Illustrations used for story-telling and mirth-making have enlivened Asian walls, scrolls, books, public and private places, and artifacts for millennia. Often playful and humorous, Asian pictorial stories lent conspicuous elements to contemporary comic art, particularly with their use of narrative nuance, humor, satire, and dialogue. Illustrating Asia is a fascinating book on a subject that is of wide and topical interest. All of the articles consider cartoon and/or comic art in the historical and social setting of seven South, Southeast, and East Asian countries: India, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. The contributors treat comic and narrative art—including comic books, comic strips, picture books, and humor and fan magazines—in both historical and socio-cultural perspectives, as well as portrayals of ancient Chinese philosophy, gender, and the enemy in cartoons and comics. Contributors: Laine Berman, John A. Lent, Fusami Ogi, Rei Okamoto, Ronald Provencher, Aruna Rao, Kuiyi Shen, Shimizu Isao, Shu-chu Wei, Yingjin Zhang.

Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books

Illustrating Asia

This final work in John Lent's series of bibliographies on comic art gathers together an astounding array of citations on American comic books and comic strips. Included in this volume are citations regarding anthologies and reprints; criticism and reviews; exhibitions, festivals, and awards; scholarship and theory; and the business, artistic, cultural, legal, technical, and technological aspects of American comics. Author John Lent has used all manner of methods to gather the citations, searching library and online databases, contacting scholars and other professionals, attending conferences and festivals, and scanning hundreds of periodicals. He has gone to great length to categorize the citations in an easy-to-use, scholarly fashion, and in the process, has helped to establish the field of comic art as an important part of social science and humanities research. The ten volumes in this series, covering all regions of the world, constitute the largest printed bibliography of comic art in the world, and serve as the beacon guiding the burgeoning fields of animation, comics, and cartooning. They are the definitive works on comic art research, and are exhaustive in their inclusiveness, covering all types of publications (academic, trade, popular, fan, etc.) from all over the world. Also included in these books are citations to systematically-researched academic exercises, as well as more ephemeral sources such as fanzines, press articles, and fugitive materials (conference papers, unpublished documents, etc.), attesting to Lent's belief that all pieces of information are vital in a new field of study such as comic art.

An International Bibliography

Comic Books and Comic Strips in the United States Through 2005

Provides the first continent-wide analysis of animation, delving into issues of production, distribution, exhibition, aesthetics and regulation

An exhaustive, well-organized bibliography on all aspects of comic art, animation, caricature, and cartooning from Canada and the United States. Its more than 11,000 entries make it and the other ten volumes in the series the definitive references on comic art.

Comic Art of the United States Through 2000, Animation and Cartoons

Mike Rhode

A worldwide classification system of comic art, including comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature, political & editorial cartoons, and gag cartoons based on John A. Lent's pioneering bibliographic work. Created in honor of Lent's 80th birthday.

The Lent Comic Art Classification System

Art Historian David Kunzle introduces this comprehensive bibliography, which covers 29 countries in Europe, where the study of comic art first began.

John A. Lent

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