Book Review - The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. The Waiting. Montreal:  Drawn & Quarterly, 2021. 246 pp. 978-1-77046-457-5. US $24.95. https://drawnandquarterly.com/waiting

  reviewed by John A. Lent

South Korean graphic novelist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim has a knack for digging up personal stories related to historical tragedies of her country. She is truly what I call an “investigative cartoonist.” Gendry-Kim has used these reportorial skills over and over during the past decade. They are evident in her many awards-winning graphic novel, Grass (2019), the story of the “comfort women,” enslaved East Asian girls used to sexually service Japanese soldiers during World War II, as told to her by one surviving Korean comfort woman and backed up by nine other victims. Gendry-Kim found an elderly Korean man still living in Japan who experienced one of the atomic bombings while working in Japan in the 1940s, willing to explain how he and fellow Korean laborers were passed over and denied reparation funds by the Japanese government, in her A Day with Grandfather (2017).

Mixing fiction and fact, Gendry-Kim continues to bring attention to Korean national tragedies through the personal experiences of those who endured them. Among her 20 or so books, all completed since 2012, are Jiseul (2015), an account of the massacre of civilians by the South Korean army during the Korean War, and her latest title, The Waiting (2021).

The marginal status of women in a patriarchal society such as Korea is a common theme in Gendry-Kim’s books, as it is in The Waiting. In fact, very few men appear in this story inspired by her mother’s personal experiences at the end of the Korean War, and a few men who do show up are not desirable characters--the neighbor who steals a child’s dog and cooks it; a slothful male who abandons his sister-in-law and her child under terrible conditions.

During and after the Korean War, many families were separated, as were Gendry-Kim’s mother and her mother’s sister (Gendry-Kim’s aunt), who never made it out of North Korea. The Waiting weaves between Gendry-Kim’s present feelings of sorrow and guilt for having to leave her mother in Seoul and moving to Ganghwa Island; her mother’s anxiety about her sister’s fate in North Korea and her disappointment at continually not being chosen for the regularly-arranged separated family reunions, and the fictional character Gwila’s sorrowful tale of being separated from her husband and son during the war.

Gendry-Kim based her story on her own feelings, her mother’s testimonies, the tales of two elderly people she interviewed who had been able to meet their North Korean family members, and her further research. In a two-page textual afterword, “A Lifetime of Waiting,” the author begins with, “This is my mother’s story,” and ends it by dedicating the book to her mother. In between, she shares a bit about her own career and the fears and wishes of her two interviewees and asks questions others have asked for millennia--“How many people in this world have been wounded by war?” and “How many have had their loved ones torn from them because of war?” As the song says, “the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.”

The Waiting is a full package of emotions:  hope and despair, love and hate, joy and sorrow, kindness and cruelty, guilt and relief, and the terribleness of war without a positive corollary. The book is true to Gendry-Kim’s standard--a great read, first-hand researched, and filled with penetrating thoughts relatable to the many who have experienced war firsthand, and sobering to those who have romanticized, sanitized, and glamorized notions of war.

Exhibit Review: Beano: The Art Of Breaking The Rules

 Beano: The Art Of Breaking The Rules. Andy Holden. London: Somerset House, October 21, 2021-March 6, 2022. https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/beano-art-of-breaking-the-rules

Reviewed by Mark Hibbett

There are two separate exhibitions happening at once in Somerset House's Beano: The Art Of Breaking The Rules, one of which is significantly more successful than the other.

The first is a fascinating retrospective of Beano strips going all the way back to the comic's beginnings in 1938, with original artwork sitting next to vintage comics. The curator, Andy Holden, has done a great job of bringing together rarely-seen originals that still fizz with life decades later. The work of established greats like Leo Baxendale and Dudley Watkins sing with excitement, and Jim Petrie's Minnie The Minx similarly bursts from the pages, even when those pages are browned with age. Seeing the work up close like this is a real thrill, especially when you notice margin notes such as the conversation between Leo Baxendale and his wife about the need to get the page inked and round to DC Thomson offices by the next day.

Throughout the show the original artwork is treated with respect, with artists properly credited and captions which tell the story of how The Beano became such an entrenched part of British life. The discussion on how a "slap-up feast" came to be such a constant of the comic during wartime was especially illuminating, and anyone who has ever been a child in the UK is bound to get a few rushes of nostalgic joy. For me it was seeing original cover art for Plug, a comic I've not thought about for at least 40 years, and the sight of those much-coveted Dennis and Gnasher fan club badges and "smart wallet."

It's also surprisingly funny. Like many, I gave up on The Beano as a surly twelve-year old ready for the more "grown-up" delights of Marvel and 2000 AD, and so was surprised by how many times I laughed out loud. There's a cheeky, mildly subversive sense of humour that is highlighted throughout, in the showcased strips as well as other parts of the exhibition. Favorites here were a handwritten letter to the editor from 1948 ("Will you please stop Lord Snooty") and the caption for a Banksy screen print which says "Banksy declined to be in the show but we ... included him anyway, because Dennis and his pals never accept an authoritative 'no’."

The second exhibition could have done with a lot more of this sort of attitude. As with the Good Grief Charlie Brown show in 2018, Somerset House does not seem to be confident enough to do an exhibition just about comics, and has to drag in some “Proper Art” as well. There are some commissioned works which in theory are responses to The Beano, but mostly it's pre-existing art that only has a very tenuous link with the main theme, and appears to be there as way to guide children away from comics and towards something more culturally acceptable.

Honourable exceptions to this include Horace Panter's answer to David Hockney's Splash and David Litchfield's Lowry-inspired Beanotown, but most of the rest of this part of the exhibit looks rather dull and pompous next to the exciting, dynamic and witty world of the Beano strips. A piece inspired by "The Numbskulls," for instance, looks like a dreary exercise in stating the obvious next to the wild invention of the actual comic, and seeing expensive, ponderous fine art  described as "playful" or "witty" just seems daft in a room full of cheap, accessible, and genuinely funny Beano strips down through the years.

 

Despite all that, this remains a beautifully put together exhibition showing off a wildly inventive part of British culture that does not get anything like enough attention. It's a shame that Teacher had to get involved so much, but in the end Dennis, Minnie and all the others are the real stars of the show.

Book Review - Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism by Paul S. Hirsch

 Paul S. Hirsch. Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism. Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 2021. 335 pp. 9780226350554. $30.00. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo22868356.html

 reviewed by John A. Lent

“The Secret History of…” subtitles a few recent books in comics scholarship, leaving some of us befuddled as to what is the secret. That is not the total case with Paul S. Hirsch’s Pulp Empire:  The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism. There are some of us who have researched the political economy of comics--topics such as conglomerate ownership of the comics industries, corporate/government tie-ins to comic/cartoon art, or governmental roles relative to comics of a regulatory, restrictive, and occasionally facilitative nature, all slighted in the corpus of literature. At least Matt McAllister, Kent Worcester, Leonard Rifas, and this reviewer are among scholars dealing with these issues.

However, much of what we believe about the United States government’s use of comic books for propaganda purposes has been based on supposition and a general distrust of agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), United States Information Agency (USIA), Writers War Board (WWB), and State Department. Paul S. Hirsch provides the proof aplenty of government’s active role, after searching thousands of previously classified boxes of documents in the Library of Congress, that he discovered accidentally. Hirsch related how he took laps around the library table (on his robotic legs)¹ to express his excitement after finding this trove of “real” secret materials.

Hirsch found ample evidence that during World War II, the Writers War Board and other official agencies encouraged major comics publishing companies (Timely was an exception) to depict all Germans and Japanese (not just the military) as subhuman and not worthy to live; that during the Cold War, the CIA, State Department, and other groups used comic books to promote the U.S. official, clandestine foreign policy and win the hearts and minds of the developing world and Communist bloc, and generally, present the U.S. as a “positive egalitarian country.”

Hirsch very effectively covers much ground and is able to provide useful contextual background in a coherent, well-organized fashion, full of fascinating excerpts from the comics, anecdotes, quoted material, and facts and opinions extracted from “secret war records, official legislative documents, and caches of personal papers.” Through textual analyses of the actual comic books and strips, he tells about cartoon characters, such as Little Moe, created by the USIA, to show the grim life of a citizen of an unnamed Communist nation. As Hirsch relates it:

…Moe is shivering in his small hovel. An overweight party functionary barges in and orders Moe to hang a picture of a leading communist over his fireplace. In the next panel, Moe’s dog, pleading to come in from the cold, enters the hovel. In the final panel, the dog sees the grim image above the fireplace and immediately begins pleading with Moe to let him back outside (pp. 226-227).

The author supplements his review of documents with interviews, one of which was with relatives of Malcolm Ater, owner of Commercial Comics, the largest producer of state-sponsored propaganda comic books. Apparently, Ater and the CIA operated together in a hushed manner familiar to devotees of spy movies or comics. Hirsch said:

Whenever the agency needed a run of special comic books, Ater would drive to Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, and stand on the sidewalk until a car driven by CIA employees pulled up. Once Ater entered the car, it drove in endless loops around Dupont Circle. The employees told Ater what sort of comic book they wanted, what languages to use, and when it was needed. They then handed him a large bag of cash and let him out. Once the comic was finished, Ater would return to Dupont Circle. In the car again, he would hand over proofs for agency approval. After he received the go-ahead, he would print the comic book and deliver the copies to the CIA.

Pulp Empire is spiced with interesting tidbits, e.g., that country singer and songwriter Hank Williams admitted to getting lyrics for his songs from reading romance comics, that a 1944 comics story “revealed” that “Filipinos Are People,” or that the atomic bomb was treated for laughs in Donald Duck comics. (On the other hand, EC Comics took a serious approach.)

Much space was given to the anti-comics campaign of the late 1940s and 1950s--how the U.S. government switched from being a proponent of comics during World War II to siding with Dr. Fredric Wertham and others that they were carriers of brutal violence and explicit sex that led to juvenile delinquency; how Wertham ignored scientific principles in conducting his research; how comics fashioned racism, and how they were tamed in 1954 with the creation of the Comics Magazine Association of America and the seal of approval. Chapter Five, cleverly titled, “American Civilization Means Airstrips and Comic Strips,” deals with ensuing anti-comics campaigns outside of the U.S.; unfortunately, it singles out only France and Britain, when, in fact, such campaigns existed in at least a couple dozen countries.

The seven main chapters treat the topics chronologically, with a few diversions backward or forward, and even sideway, that enrich the narrative. Hirsch takes pains to define terms, such as “disposable culture” and “comics as trash,” as well as comic book/government wartime conceptions of the allies, enemies, and race. Documenting his wide range of primary and secondary sources, the author provides 31 pages of information and citation endnotes.

The book is enriched by a higher-than-normal grade of paper, classy design, and 45 brightly-colored illustrations. The end result is a remarkable volume, very rich and unique in the depth of research, attractive in design, highly-revealing and full in content, and crisp and pleasurable in readability.

 ¹ Hirsch tells readers that he was run over by a hit-and-run truck driver when he was 25 years old and lost both of his legs.

 

A version of this review will appear in the next issue of IJOCA

Two upcoming presentations by IJOCA writer CT Lim

Where to Draw The Line

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/programme-details/conversations/where-to-draw-the-line

Conversations  |  General  |  English  |  1 hr

Buy Festival Pass (FP) 

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13 Nov Sat, 2:30pm - 3:30pm

Festival Pass  - $16 (Early Bird) | $20 (Regular)

SISTIC Live

Add To Calendar

About

Whenever there's an epic failure or event on a global scale, you can be sure that satirical comic authors will soon have their say. How does their brand of dark humour keep us sane, critical, and honest about our society, without trivialising very real concerns? Join these comic creators as we look upon a world on fire with concern, hope, and nervous laughter.

This programme includes a live Q&A towards the end of the session.

Writers / Presenters

Anngee Neo

Anngee is a Singapore-based illustrator who creates drawings with an emphasis on storytelling with compelling characters. Her quirky, surreal and whimsical works have breathed life to children's books such as The Rock and the Bird, and Do Gallery Sitters Sit All Day? Things People Really Do in a Museum. She has made illustrations for campaigns and books for clients such as National Gallery Singapore, National Museum of Singapore, and Esplanade.

Read More

 

KAL

Kevin Kallaugher (KAL) is the international award-winning editorial cartoonist for The Economist magazine of London, The Baltimore Sun and Counterpoint. In a distinguished career that spans 43 years, KAL has published over 10,000 cartoons and 150 magazine covers. His resume includes six collections of his published work, exhibitions in a dozen countries, and awards and honours in seven.

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highnunchicken

highnunchicken is a group of cartoonists that capture their perspective of life in Singapore through cartoons. It's all rather silly, and you'd better spend your time on other things online.

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Moderator

CT Lim

CT Lim is an educator who writes about history and popular culture. His articles have appeared in the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Journal of Popular Culture, and Print Quarterly.

From Disposable to Desirable: Talking 'Trash' About Comics

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/programme-details/conversations/from-disposable-to-desirable-talking-trash-about-comics

Conversations  |  SEA Focus  |  English  |  1 hr

Buy Festival Pass (FP) 

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10 Nov Wed, 7pm - 8pm

Festival Pass  - $16 (Early Bird) | $20 (Regular)

SISTIC Live

Add To Calendar

About

Do popular genres in comics such as horror or superheroes only seek to entertain? How should comics tackling difficult topics and histories regard their reader? This panel considers the guilt and pleasures that we associate with comics, and examine our misconceptions and assumptions towards this storytelling form.

This pre-recorded programme is co-presented with Singapore Book Council.

Writers / Presenters

黄珮珊 Huang Pei-Shan

Huang Pei-Shan is the founder of Slowork Publishing. She studied in Taipei and Marseille, majoring in Theatre Design and Contemporary Art. She is passionate about documentary works that show the diversity of culture. She pushes promising new artists to uncover the possibilities of producing documentaries through comic art by digging into hidden stories.

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K.S.

Tan Kheng Seng (K.S) is from Malaysia, where he served as the 3rd President of the Mandarin Comics Society Malaysia (2013–2015). He started drawing short stories serialised in the comic magazine Shao Nian Comic in 1991. In 1992, he started drawing long-form comics, some notable works being Storm Boy and Jiu Wen Long. In the year 2014, KS published horror webcomic Silent Horror, which attracted much attention on the internet and was showcased in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Xiamen, etc. At the same time, Silent Horror was featured on website Tapas (America), where it received more than 100 million views.

Read More

 

Tian Veasna

Tian Veasna was born in Cambodia in 1975, three days after the Khmer Rouge came to power. He moved to France with his parents in 1980, where he graduated from Strasbourg's École des Arts Décoratifs in 2001. Since then, he worked in publishing and visual arts, and published his first graphic novel, Year of the Rabbit, that tells the story of his family during the genocide.

Read More

Moderator

CT Lim

CT Lim is an educator who writes about history and popular culture. His articles have appeared in the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Journal of Popular Culture, and Print Quarterly.

Book Review - Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship, by George and Liew

reviewed by Leonard Rifas

Cherian George and Sonny Liew. Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship. MIT Press, 2021. $34.95. ISBN: 97802625430
19 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/red-lines

Red Lines surveys “21^st century restrictions on freedom of expression as experienced by political cartoonists around the world.” The most dramatic cases are of cartoonists who have been assassinated; abducted and presumed killed; arrested and died in custody; assaulted; jailed; threatened; sued; fired; or were forced into exile. In addition to presenting their stories, the authors describe the very ordinary, market-based pressures which result in dissenting cartoons playing a much smaller role than they could in the liberal democracies of the West.

The co-authors briefly include their own backgrounds. Cherian George had served for a few years in the 1990s as art and photo editor of the largest newspaper in Singapore, and Sonny Liew created a rightly-celebrated graphic novel about Singapore’s history. Unlike other nations with strong economies, Singapore lacks press freedom. Liew was responsible for the “scrappy,” very visual treatment of the text, and also contributed portraits of several of the cartoonists.

Their book’s scope is truly global, with examples from more than sixty nations. They thank such people as the supremely well-connected John Lent, the activist organization Cartoonists Rights Network International, Daryl Cagle, and others for their help in making this possible. For Red Lines, they interviewed over five dozen cartoonists from six continents, and they cite scholarly material from over 200 published sources (all in English.)

The idea of a “political cartoon” has no clear boundaries. For this project, George and Liew define “political cartooning” quickly and simply as “drawn commentary on current affairs.” They also include some examples from “the associated arts of caricature, comic strips, memes, and graphic novels.” Although clearly tangential to the kind of work that they love, the co-authors admit that memes have become “the most prevalent genre of political cartooning today” and credit memes for introducing a more participatory and engaging way of distributing messages (though through a medium, the internet, which has the potential to become the most fully regulated space ever known.) 

The political cartoons that seem closest to the heart of their project could be described more narrowly as single-panel, satirical drawings, published for a mass audience in a newspaper or magazine or posted on the web, which denounce a leader’s wrongdoing and for which the cartoonists paid a penalty. Even using this more restrictive definition, one book could not include every 21^st century cartoonist who has encountered serious limits to their artistic freedom.

Red Lines’ chapter on “The Boys’ Club” notes that “Traditional studies of censorship didn’t explore the gender dimension.” Ironically, even in studies of how various voices have been silenced, those “silences resulting from sexual discrimination were often ignored.” Once the issue has been raised, it becomes evident that “gender-based censorship” exists “everywhere” and that gender-based hierarchy and oppression rely on this. 

Red Lines discusses several extreme examples of gender-based censorship, including the persecution of Iranian cartoonist Atena Farghadani. Her cartoon mocking legislators who had passed a sexist law led to Farghadani receiving a prison sentence of 12 years. (She served two years before being released because of international pressure.) In the United States, some women cartoonists are silenced by the more everyday means of online harassment, which can create what Anita Sarkeesian calls an environment “too toxic and hostile to endure.” 

The focus on 21^st century examples keeps the book feeling current and fresh, but the authors also include some well-chosen historical examples for context, particularly in their chapter on racist cartoons. As George and Liew acknowledge, in the battles to promote full rights and respect for the dignity of all groups of people, some cartoonists have taken one side in these conflicts while some cartoonists have worked on the other opposing side.

In addition to the brutal older methods of state repression and the quieter and more effective methods of economic strangulation, increasingly the pressure on cartoonists comes from mob action, either in person or, more commonly, on the web. Internet responses to provocative cartoons can serve positive ends. George and Liew credit such criticism for sometimes helping cartoonists learn to avoid committing unintended offenses with lazy stereotypes, and for contributing to the evolution of society. 

Not all complaints, though, are well-founded or made in good faith. Sometimes political entrepreneurs strategically take offense, manufacture outrage and perform victimhood to advance a political cause. Cartoonists are sometimes caught in the crossfire of “proxy battles” in larger cultural wars. The rhetoric of “victimhood” has been used both by discriminated-against minorities and by majoritarian nationalists. Red Lines advises cartoonists to learn to tell the difference “between surrendering to a mob and adapting one’s work in solidarity with the oppressed.” The simple rule of “punching up and not kicking down,” though, becomes complicated partly because people disagree on which direction is up. For example, Red Lines asks: “Are cartoons about Muslims and terrorism punching up at a global movement of extremists […] or kicking down at marginalized Muslim minorities in the West?”

The long, penultimate chapter focuses on the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in 2015. The chapter (while, of course, never condoning the crime) analyzes the offending cartoons from multiple perspectives, and then rather than surrendering to “the Rashomon effect,” intentionally “privileges the perspective of the cartoonists at the center of the controversy.” By this, they mean that they trace the previous decade’s most immediately-relevant events that had led up to their deaths. The book does not simplistically deify the murdered artists as noble martyrs to high principles. The final word goes to a surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, “Luz,” who says “The simple fact is that our friends died.”

Red Lines’ perspective seems more multinational than international, emphasizing each cartoonist’s situation largely within his or her own national context. Several of the nations in which cartoonists have suffered repression have been targets of the US government’s ongoing attempts to weaken their regimes or overthrow their leaders, including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, China, and Iran. Nothing brings out the censors like a state of war, and, it would have been appropriate to add, this also applies in nations bedeviled by the CIA’s undeclared wars and the US Treasury Department’s sanctions.  (Possibly no recent study has been written that focuses directly on the historic roles of editorial cartooning in international propaganda campaigns, psychological warfare operations, and destabilization efforts.)

Given recent developments (with most jobs for professional, full-time staff cartoonists still disappearing rapidly), when the authors struggle to end on a hopeful note, they conclude simply that cartooning will not die. Political cartoonists who follow current affairs closely, demonstrate artistic skill, and seek to contribute to civic engagement will continue to struggle onward. Students and others who wish to support those struggles can find in this attractive volume a welcome, wide-ranging and nuanced introduction to the issue of cartoon censorship.

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 24-1.