by ct lim
When I first met John Lent in 1992 in Singapore, he told me a story. How he decided to do his postgraduate studies to escape the draft. “is that the Vietnam War, John?” “No, but it was after the Korean War.”
In 1992, John was 56 years old. I was 20 years old. This year, I will only be 54 years old. And John is still older than me now when I first met him!
Many tributes have poured in since the news of John’s passing broke. If you have read them, you would come to a conclusion (and there could be many conclusions or beginnings for a life as rich as John’s) that Asia and the Third World were his focus and, in many ways, his method.
A search will turn up many articles, chapters and books he wrote and edited about Asian mass communications, press freedom, cinema, animation, cartoons, comic strips and comics. Narrowing that and you have specific regions and countries like East Asia, South Asia, North Asia and where I am from, Southeast Asia.
A sampling: https://independent.academia.edu/JOHNLENT
Many of his earlier books on comics and cartoons (published in the 1990s) were on Asia in general. But his connections with Southeast Asia went back to his early years of university teaching in the 1970s. Having taught in the Philippines and Malaysia, he wrote critically about the mass communications and press freedom in these countries and also Singapore. He described the mass media in these countries as ‘development journalism’, which meant “government say so” journalism, resulting in authoritarian media policies. This incurred the wrath of the Singapore government in the 1970s and John was labelled as one of those troublemaker academics from overseas who sniped from a safe distance and far from the borders of Singapore. John was named in the Singapore newspapers, which if you think about it, it’s ironic. They sort of proved John’s point about development journalism.
Thus, he told me he was afraid he would not be able to come through the Singapore customs in 1992, when we met. That was the year he did his Southeast Asian trip to countries like Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines to meet artists, editors and publishers. This was also around the time he met Lat and Muliyadi Mahamood of Malaysia, I found out later. Lat shared that John invited him to many places, conferences and events; Muliyadi said John has helped him a lot academically.
From this 1992 tour, John wrote many articles about Southeast Asian cartoons and comic strips that appeared in various journals. He interviewed me and I interviewed him for BigO. But we got something more from him too. I introduced him to Michael Cheah, the editor / publisher of BigO and Mike was interested to meet John because Mike used to be a reporter for the Singapore Monitor and he has read John’s stuff before. Long story short, we got John to write about Asian and SEA comics for BigO. Mike passed away from heart problems a few years ago.
The 1990s, in my mind, was the start of a number of dedicated volumes that John put out on Southeast Asian comics and cartoons. He has been editing Berita, a periodical on Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei studies, but one of the first specialized edited volumes on Southeast Asian cartooning appeared in Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science Volume 25, Number 1 (1997). I contributed an article on ’Singapore Political Cartooning’, which was based on the history honors dissertation I wrote just the year before. Enough has been said about John giving young aspiring scholars their first chance. But I didn’t become an academic, I became a history teacher instead. I would repeat this joke to Ian Gordon after a few drinks. If I had done my honors dissertation on the history of Singapore cinema or music, I would have more of an academic career. Whether I succeed or fail in that field is a different story. But I focused on comics, and since the late 1990s, I was just known as the guy who wrote about comics, the ‘cartoon guy’ who was not to be taken seriously by the academic elite in Singapore universities. I should have written for Asian Cinema (also started and edited by John at one point) instead of the International Journal of Comic Art. Maybe I should blame John for this. But a friendship of 34 years? Nah, I would not trade anything for that.
An example of that friendship was when I was asked to put together a special issue on SEA comics for SPAFA (SEAMEO Regional Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts) journal in 2007 and when I approached John, he gamely wrote the lead article.
Two other SEA volumes followed in the 2000s and John has always made a point to include me - Southeast Asian Cartoon Art: History, Trends and Problems and Transnationalism in East and Southeast Asian Comics Art. The former’s chapter on Singapore Chinese cartoons was based on my master’s thesis and the latter was the result of a symposium John put together with Benjamin Ng and Wendy Wong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018. On specific SEA countries, John wrote The First One Hundred Years of Philippine Komiks and Cartoons, which was an extension of an article he wrote in Comic Book Artist Vol 2 No 4 (2004). The book is still much referred to today.
A preview of the Comic Book Artist article is here: https://issuu.com/twomorrows/docs/cbav2-4preview/18
But an older but more complete article on the Philippines is here: https://archium.ateneo.edu/phstudies/vol46/iss2/5/
(it is not a coincidence that when Ian Gordon and I decided to meet on the evening of 18 May in Singapore to drink a toast to John, we gravitated to a Philippines pub)
Of course, one should not forget the post retirement (John retired from Temple University in 2011) monumental volumes of the 2010s to present - the University of Mississippi Press’ Asian Comics, Comics Art in China, Asian Political Cartoons and Comics Art in Korea. One more on the Caribbean is akan datang (coming soon).
I did not always agree with John. But I think he would not want it any other way. The last time I saw him in 2018 in Hong Kong, I jokingly said what he was doing (traveling all over the world) was not great for his carbon footprint. Of course, it was great he was still up and about, lots of energy and flying all over and giving us a chance to meet him. But I was worried that all that flying was not good for his health. I would rather fly to America to see him if I could. Still, whenever I hear he is in the vicinity, I would fly to meet him, like in 2016 when I flew to Kuala Lumpur over the weekend. We just hung out for 2 days and it was a good trip. We met up with Muliyadi and we went to interview Nora Abdullah, a pioneer female Malay artist who drew comics in the 1950s. The interview appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art (where else?). Nora has since passed.
My main disagreement with John is his approach. It is great that he would sweep in into any place and quickly suss out the cartoonists, the artists, the editors, the publishers, the translators and even the fixers. Of course, all these required weeks or months of prep beforehand to set up the meetings. But John’s time in these places were short and he interviewed whoever he could find, and visited offices and studios in a matter of days, sometimes less than a week. I think he would admit there is a flaw or very clear limitations of such a parachute method. You are on a SWAT / commando / SAS mission, to the dirty and get in and out when the job is done. John would maintain contact with those he met, but whatever he saw, heard, read or bought would be a snapshot of that place’s comics at that particular point in time. You can only generalize to a very limited extent. But perhaps due to his training in the social sciences (mass communications), John leans towards making generalizations. He would also conflate the information from his interviews. For example, he would interview an artist in the 1990s and later in the 2010s. He would put the quotes from the two interviews together, and it reads like it is from a recent interview conducted. You will only know if you read the endnotes or if you have read John’s earlier articles which used the same quotes. This is not an idle criticism of John’s work, but it is coming from a place that has looked at John’s writing critically and engaging and thinking about it to improve the field of comics studies. Or at least comics studies in SEA.
Nothing changes the fact that what John did was very important because often he was the first to document the cartoon or comic scene of that particular. He would welcome other writers and scholars to continue the work and he would generously share his contacts. I have asked him several times for leads when I visit a new place. No questions asked. John was in the business of knowledge sharing and creation. This generosity cannot be overstated.
In many ways, my response to John’s approach and trips was to extend and expand beyond what he had done. I have visited Indonesia many times, different cities, met many artists, some repeat visits, some are my good friends of over 15 years. And the first thing I will say is there is no such thing as Indonesian comics. There are comics from Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, Malang, Semarang, Solo, Jogjakarta and there are all different with some similarities, but the context and the market are different. And these are the cities in Java. (West, Central and East) There are also comics from Sumatra like Medan and so on. And when I described the comics from say, Bali (an island on its own), it is my impression of comics Bali at that particular point in time. Someone visiting Bali at a different time could have a very different experience and view of the comics.
On a few occasions, when I disagreed with some things which were published in IJOCA, John would encourage me to write a letter and he would publish it. It did not matter if the article in contention was written by him or not. He wanted that exchange and discourse. Tell me I am wrong and I will stand corrected.
There is probably more I can say but it has taken me a week to write this. Like how I met Fusami Ogi in 2000 through John when he put together a comics panel at IAMCR in Singapore and both of us presented. I would meet Fusami again in 2002 in Toronto at PCA, again under the aegis of John. I would be involved with the projects of Fusami and her group of women manga profs and Japan has shown much more interest in SEA comics than North American or European comics scholars.
Except John Lent.
