ONE AFTERNOON in the middle of March 2009, Komunitas Mejabudaya called us: How about using the essay by Hikmat Darmawan in Focus 5: “Comics and the City” as the material for the discussion in Mejabudaya at the end of the month? It was an interesting collaboration offer: a discussion based on one of the essays that we have published. It did not take us long to turn the phone chat into internet publications and subsequently a real discussion held on Friday, at 3 p.m. a bit late, March 27, 2009, at Komunitas Mejabudaya, which had their basis at the HB Jassin Center for Literary Documentations, Taman Ismail Marzuki arts center, Central Jakarta.

It was a relaxed discussion. There were only a few people; eleven to be exact. Friday afternoon seemed to be not the right time to hold a discussion in Jakarta. The end-of-the-week traffic jam was enough to make people change their mind. In this small get-together, however, the discussion went on intensely. We first watched Hikmat Darmawan present the pictures of the romance comics that he used for his essay. After that, at the long table, the question-and-answer session grew to become a lively discussion.

There were a number of intriguing questions. Why is there no real mental landscape about Jakarta in the romance comics by Zaldy and Jan? Perhaps because in the sixties the development in Jakarta had not become as lively as it would be in the seventies. That, however, was also a weak answer, as we needed to re-check what it was that had been portrayed in the romance comics, and what had actually taken place in Jakarta that we could depict in the romance comics. Why were Monas, skyscrapers, and many other Jakarta icons that had often been depicted in the movies of the seventies, absent in the romance comics by Zaldy and Jan? Zaldy’s and Jan’s romance comics—or at least the ones that Hikmat presented before us—presented more of the interior design of upper-class houses; when there were certain exterior images, the location would be vague. It was also interesting to analyze how far the lifestyle depicted in the romance comics matched the actual lifestyle of the period. There were images that seemed to be far ahead of their time: imaginations whose accuracy with the actual social and physical conditions of the city we would need to scrutinize further. We might also need to check the influence that American romance comics had on the Indonesian comic artists at the time; how much those American comics expanded the comic artists’ imaginations, giving rise to images that seemed to be “beyond their time and place.”

The discussion still fell short of answering those questions. Those questions regarding the imagination and reality, however, are legitimate and important questions, which further researches on the Indonesian comics would need to answer. Indeed, there has been no thorough research on the Indonesian comics since Marcel Bonneff last did his research in 1971. How many aspects of the society we need to answer; and how few romance comics are available today to help us begin the necessary research.

From a small discussion in a corner of the Taman Ismail Marzuki arts center, we went home carrying those questions in our mind, storing them for further use, further expose. The discussion then became a basis for an article, “Romance comics of the ‘60s: A short-lived love story”, written by Mariani Dewi, a Jakarta Post journalist who was present in the discussion. We hope that this collaboration, which can very well begin with a simple nudge, can continue, involving other communities. We are grateful to Komunitas Mejabudaya who has invited us to hold this interesting small discussion.