Comics and graphic narratives by Southeast Asian creators have received international acclaim over the past decade. From Singapore, Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye won three Eisner Awards in 2017; Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo’s Trese, a Filipino komiks series, was adapted into a TV series by Netflix. During the COVID pandemic, graphic medicine webcomics by creators such as Weiman Koh (Singapore) and Ernest Ng (Malaysia) made international news. Southeast Asian diasporic authors in Europe and North America have also published notable graphic memoirs such as Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Vietnam) and Tian Veasna’s Year of the Rabbit (Cambodia).

While there is existing and informative scholarship on Southeast Asian comics and comics artists such as John Lent’s monograph Asian Comics and the edited collection Transnationalism in East and Southeast Asian Comics Art, these studies are largely historical or biographical. In contrast, our session engages with cultural politics and critical differences in Southeast Asian comics. We take our cue from Katherine Kelp-Stebbins’s 2022 book How Comics Travel. As Kelp-Stebbins argues, instead of “insisting that comics are intelligible identically everywhere” due to a globally recognizable visual vocabulary, reading for difference in comics means attending to “points of (un)translatability, cultural specificity, formal or commercial difference, and map[ping] out a wider, more diverse, and more democratic terrain” (7). Such differences are “not only between national traditions but also within traditions that may be national, but also international, or transnational” (7). We consider how comics and graphic narratives not only represent but also rethink social inequalities, prevailing cultural attitudes, and dominant power structures in Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Our presenters, consisting of three senior scholars and a doctoral candidate, also examine how Southeast Asian comics creators engage with national and transnational linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic elements.

Each speaker will give a 13-minute presentation, ensuring ample time for unstructured discussion.

Weihsin Gui’s talk examines how noir, a genre popularized in mid-twentieth-century American film, can be a critical aesthetic in two recent comics: Sprawl by Felix Cheong and Arif Rahan from Singapore, and Muros: Within Magical Walls by Paulo Chikiamco and Borg Sinaban from the Philippines. Gui proposes that the two comics adapt film noir’s gritty realism, hard-boiled pessimism, and diminished masculinity to represent and critique socio-political events. Sprawltakes up recent scandals regarding bribery and sexual misconduct among Singaporean politicians; Muros addresses the authoritarian violence and populist machismo of former Filipino president Roderigo Durterte and his regime.

Also focusing on genre, Jennifer Goodlander discusses the Indonesian superhero Sri Asih from the comic by R.A. Kosasih in 1954 and released as a blockbuster film in 2023 with international distribution, together with the recent comic series Luh Ayu Manik Mas. Each of these centers on a young girl who has a superhero alter ego wearing traditional dress to resemble a character from a wayang play. They rescue the world from evil, while dramatizing tensions between their modern and mythic selves. Goodlander examines representations of Indonesian women as presented in comics in relation to wayang and film, analyzing the tensions between tradition and global modernity, especially for women.

Turning from superheroes to comedy, Michael Garcia examines Indonesia Banget! (Very Indonesian), a comic series by Muhammad “Mice” Misrad that captures and reifies Indonesian popular culture. With a keen eye for Indonesian culture and its people, Mice often depicts Indonesian characters as stock figures artfully mined for comedic effect. However, non-Indonesians are unlikely to identify the country of origin from the visual art, and translations of the verbal dialogue require cultural unpacking for the humor and cultural commentary to be understood. By discussing Mice’s comics, Garcia argues for a theory of translation across national boundaries that underscores communicating cultural contexts and conveying socio-political commentary.

Transnationalism is also addressed in Sarah Garrod’s talk on Chinese Whispers, an online graphic novel by Indonesian Australian author Rani Pramesti. Available in both Bahasa Indonesia and English, the comic recounts the 1998 riots that primarily targeted Chinese Indonesians through the perspective of Rani (who moved to Australia to escape the riots as a child) and her interviewees from Australia’s Indonesian community. Garrod proposes that Chinese Whispers not only expresses Sigmund Freud’s concept of melancholia but also expands on it through diasporic graphic memoir. Here, the ego cannot detach itself from the object of loss and also cannot conceive of the object’s and, in turn, the ego’s own existence and identity.