JOURNAL OF THE SIAM SOCIETY: The Art of Thai Comics (review)

Review by Philip Cornwel-Smith, Journal of the Siam Society, Vol 110, Part 1, 2022

Decades before today’s era of people burying their faces in handphone screens, many Thais passed time by burying their faces in comic books. Palm-sized comic books of pulp fiction on pulpy paper were a default leisure haven for Thai children, teens and many adults. Comics were an ubiquitous sight, whether on buses, at market stalls, behind cashier counters, in waiting rooms, in food courts, everywhere. As with people browsing phones while walking, it wasn’t unusual to find urban youth dawdling through Siam Square while thumbing through the frames of a Vibulkit manga yarn or a MahaSanuk slapstick lark.

During their 1980s-2000s peak, comic books were often the only kind of book, aside from manuals, that were found in a home, workplace or knapsack. The biggest single section of any bookshop was commandeered by comic book series. Comic stalls formed the busiest section of Thai book fairs, from which fans still fill wheeled suitcases with whole comic book series.

Specialist comic shops sprang up, most famously in Siam Square, Chatuchak Weekend Market and the corner of Samyan, where students waiting for their bus would browse the shelves. As comics were produced in series and in standard sizes, they were often sold in batches tied with string. The spectacle of hefty blocks of comics being sold in bulk and stacked like bricks reinforced the impression of comic books as a disposable mass product of dubious quality – and even of moral risk.

As the era of mass-produced comics dissipates from print into digital, a re-evaluation of their cultural value is long overdue. The revelatory heritage of Thai cartoons has been documented in a groundbreaking book by Nicolas Verstappen, The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes. Fittingly, it is published in Thai and English editions by River Books, and it catalogues Thai cultural forms from traditional to pop. [Disclosure:

River Books is also my publisher and my book, Very Thai, is quoted.] This landmark study stands not just as a history and encyclopaedia of comics in Thailand, but as an indisputable statement that this popular visual medium must be taken seriously, both as an art form and as a social record.

For rest of the 10-page review, subscribe to the Journal of the Siam Society