Benny and Mice’s exploit in Jakarta

THE MONTH: September; the year: 2007. Bowled over, cartoon lovers jumped out of their seat. Two cartoon artists, Benny Rachmadi and Muhammad Misrad—better known as the pair ‘Benny & Mice’—published the book Jakarta Luar Dalem (Jakarta Inside Out).

It was indeed a good year for Benny and Mice, marking their collaboration for a full ten years. A decade, however, is a short time to judge whether or not a comic work has successfully captured the spirit of the era. The comics that are widely recognized as such usually have been around for several decades, like the Charlie Brown comics that have been published since 1952. Put On comic that was once famous in Indonesia—especially in relation to the Chinese community in Indonesia or especially in Jakarta—required more than thirty years before it was deemed as the reflection of its era. The long time span also ascertains that there have been enough materials which will help us to trace the social, political, and cultural changes that have taken place.

But, really, in the case of our pair Benny and Mice here, one decade is not only enough to judge their success in terms of their technical evolutions, or their ability to garner a large audience for their ability to make their readers think that “life becomes a bit brighter” in the midst of the frustration and stressful urban lives, but also because in their creative approach so far, they have combined two kinds of methods: the scheduled book projects, and the strip comics.

In 1997, alongside the Penerbit Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia (KPG Publisher), Benny and Mice were involved in the project to publish the series Lagak Jakarta (Jakarta Exploits). Until 2007, they have issued seven titles: Trend dan Prilaku (Trend and Attitude), Transportasi (Transportation), Profesi (Profession), Krisis… Oh… Krisis (Crisis, O, Crisis), Reformasi (Reformation), and (Huru-Hara) Hura-Hura Pemilu ‘99 ([Chaos] Carnival of ’99 General Election). KPG, who first found and nurtured the birth of the pair, eventually repackaged and published Lagak Jakarta in as collector’s items, combining the six titles in the series in two books, to mark the decade of the pair’s collaboration. Soon after, KPG also published another title by the pair, 100 Tokoh yang Mewarnai Jakarta (100 Figures that Color Jakarta). At the same time, Penerbit Nalar (Nalar Publishing) also launched a collection of Benny and Mice’s comic strips in the Kompas daily in a book titled Kartun Benny & Mice: Jakarta Luar Dalem (Benny & Mice’s Cartoons: Jakarta Inside Out). The second title in the series followed afterward, Kartun Benny & Mice: Jakarta Atas Bawah (Benny & Mice’s Cartoons: Jakarta Upside Down), interspersed by another title, Kartun Benny & Mice: Talk about Hape (Benny & Mice’s Cartoons: Talk about Handphones). Until October 2008, each title has sold more than 25,000 copies.

There are thus enough materials for us to assess Benny & Mice’s oeuvre, as something that the writer Bre Redana calls “highly relevant for their era,” especially for the lives of the Jakarta citizens at the end of the New Order and as the new era of Reformation rolls in.


JAKARTA CONFUSES, THEREFORE THEY EXIST
During a radio interview, Wimar Witoelar managed to fish for information from Benny and Mice regarding the inception of their works, which they said had been born out of the chaotic situations in Jakarta that turned the city as a dwelling where the inhabitants live in “funny conditions.”

The matter of the chaotic development of Jakarta that gives rise to peculiar living is nothing new. This phenomenon has at least been detected in 1995 when a number of Dutch and Indonesian academics from a variety of background gathered in Leiden, the Netherlands, to discuss about the development of Jakarta and its inhabitants. The discussion results were published in the book Jakarta – Batavia: Socio-cultural essays in 2000. Then in 2003, almost simultaneously with the time when Benny and Mice started to contribute their comic strips regularly to the Sunday Kompas, the urban observer Marco Kusumawijaya published his collection of essays, Jakarta: Metropolis Tunggang Langgang (Jakarta: The Helter-Skelter Metropolis).

Jakarta is indeed a city in haste; helter-skelter, even. As the capital of Indonesia, it has seen many extraordinary changes, especially in the post-war decades. The migration, which had taken place since it still carried the name of Batavia, continued in a much larger scale, therefore making the social groupings in Jakarta highly diversified. Jakarta citizens are not the selected few, and they have been affected by the hectic pace and culture of the metropolis. Jakarta is a melting pot, where the Betawis, Bataks, Sundanese, Javanese, Makassars, Chinese, Arabs, and Indians merge into one. “In Jakarta, God creates the Indonesians,” quips Lance Castles. Jakarta is the most Indonesian of cities.

The pace of change was felt even more strongly at the end of the eighties and in the early nineties. Changes during this period were of a very different kind, as the scale at which the city grew was incredibly large, involving many developments, and confirming the merging of Jakarta into the surrounding area, in a concept known as the Jabodetabek (Jakarta-Bogor-Depok-Tangerang-Bekasi) that has begun since the seventies.

The rapid urban metamorphosis strengthens the prominent position that Jakarta enjoys in comparison with other Indonesian cities. Such metamorphosis is accompanied by fundamental changes in the citizens’ lifestyles, especially those in the middle and upper classes. On the one hand, they hold on to their regional roots, but on the other hand they are a part of the as-yet-unformed metropolitan or national culture.

Under the reign of the greedy New Order regime, Jakarta was made to run hastily to the wrong direction. The city and space serve merely as an instrument of growth. As a result, Jakarta citizens were robbed of the chance to enjoy a city that essentially is a dwelling for human beings. Jakarta is not heading toward the metropolis that many dream of, but rather toward miseropolis, a city rife with grief, uncontrollably chaotic, with no identity, grace, and love, lacking facilities and utilities, therefore causing miseries for its citizen. The wave of political reformation that surged in 1998 not only brought Suharto down, but also broke down the old system that insulated Jakarta from the public demands for transparent governance. It soon transpired that Jakarta chaos was not a mere babble of a few observers.

The years when Benny and Mice created their work was the time when all the problems that those observers had described reached their peak. At that time, anyone could feel and see how Jakarta’s developments are heading toward chaos—if not failure. Benny and Mice, also Jakarta citizens, were no exceptions. For them, however, the chaos in Jakarta serves as their source of inspirations; they “work as shrewd observers… as anthropologist and sociologist par excellence.” The fact is that they have been present with the awareness to join and keep on situating themselves in the midst of the streams to reveal and understand the various problems in Jakarta that have existed and flourished since the nineties.


BENNY AND MICE: AS HUMAN BEINGS AND CARTOON CHARACTERS
Benny Rachmadi or Benny was born in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, August 23, 1969. Grown up in Samarinda and enjoyed drawing since he was a child, he dreamt of studying graphic design in Jakarta. In 1986, he moved to Jakarta to study at the Graphic Design Department, Faculty of Art, Jakarta Institute of Arts (IKJ), where he subsequently met the “Betawi boy” born on July 23, 1970, Muhammad Misrad or Mice, who took his Diploma 3 degree in the same department in 1988. Since his high school years, Mice had been sending his drawings to various magazines and wanted to be a cartoonist because he was impressed by illustrations on the advertisement boards.

It was during their years at the IKJ that Benny and Mice became “comrade-in-arms.” The duet managed the IKJ news board. In their hands, the board, which previously displayed academic writing, presented cartoons on daily happenings. One could see there the emergence of the seeds of witty reportage through cartoons.

It was the editor-in-chief of KPG, Parakitri Simbolon, who detected Benny and Mice’s potentials when in 1997 – 1998 they made the illustrations for the adaptation of the book The Death of Economics by Paul Ormerod. Seeing their works, KPG offered them the chance to publish a book of their own. The title “Lagak Jakarta” (Jakarta Exploits) was Parakitri Simbolon’s brainchild; while Pax Benedanto and Chandra Gautama were KPG editors who helped nurse the birth of the work seriously. “The experience of managing the news board was quite helpful, as it helped us to work as a team,” Benny reminisced.

This brings to mind Kwo Wan Gie’s similar experience when he started the Put On series. Some other parties have played a role in developing the angle and ideas for the comic. Ang Jan Goan and Kwee Kek Beng, the manager and editor in chief of Sin Po newspaper, were two people who had been very helpful to Kho Wan Gie. Meanwhile, in the case of Benny and Mice, one cannot ignore the role of the KPG editors, with their strong sociological background, to forge and supply ideas and even materials, and help form Benny and Mice’s early awareness to make works that are not only entertaining but also meaningful, using a distinct angle i.e. that of cartoons.

With such background, Benny and Mice are the only cartoonists in the history of Indonesian comics, whose comic works already have a distinct angle even since the beginning. Before them, Kho Wan Gie had also been known as a comic artist whose works had certain academic content. Throughout his thirty-year work of creating the Put On cartoons, however, Kho Wan Gie never said that his works had academic values. The opinion only came later, and not from the artist himself but rather by the academics, who claimed that Put On constituted a socio-cultural document whose thirty year journey as a routine item of publication enables readers to follow the various political, social, and cultural vicissitudes of the Chinese community in Indonesia, especially in Jakarta, and how this community handled the problems that were typical for them.

One should keep in mind, however, that in the first three titles in the series of Lagak Jakarta, Benny and Mice still worked separately. Mice did the first title, Trend and Prilaku (Trends and Attitudes, 1997). Although it is obvious that Mice was a “photocopy” of the Malaysian cartoonist Lat, the work successfully depicts the consumptive and snobbish culture of Jakarta’s middle and upper classes prior to the monetary crisis in 1998 (Picture 1).

Meanwhile, Benny created the works Transportasi (Transportation, 1997) and Profesi (Profession, 1997), which show how without reliable public transportations, Jakarta is a nightmare (Picture 2). In these first works, Benny did not seem to delve deep enough into the problem, as he merely focused on public transportation but largely ignored the Jabotabek train services, which were highly characteristic of Jakarta’s relationship to its satellite cities. He even forgot to mention the modes of personal transportation in Jakarta, e.g. the use of luxurious cars and prestigious motorbikes, which would certainly add to the factual and critical aspects to his portrayal of Jakarta.

In Profesi, Benny seemed to wish to unveil Jakarta as a city that offers alternatives and hidden opportunities, especially in relation to the poor who come and stay in Jakarta while doing anything to survive, and the pertaining slums that serve as their rational option of residence. Unfortunately, the work also seems awkward and becomes increasingly flimsy in his depiction of the idea about “the city of a million hopes,” so much so that one can conclude that the work serves as a prototype of sorts for the work Lagak Jakarta: 100 Tokoh yang Mewarnai Jakarta (Jakarta Exploits: 100 Figures who Color Jakarta, 2008), which was published ten years after the publication of Profesi. The later work, unfortunately, albeit already created as collaboration between the duo, is still too awkward and flimsy to constitute a work about “important commoners.” What is notable, however, is the fact that Benny has shown how he has a distinct technical character since the beginning.

The fourth title in the series, Krisis… Oh… Krisis (Crisis, O, Crisis, 1998), albeit without the duo’s name of Benny and Mice, signified their birth as cartoon characters (Picture 3) and their first time of working as a duet. The work begins with a picture of the two of them, sun-tanning by a pool, each with a drink, just as one would picture a pair of “successful people.” In their background is the silhouette of Jakarta’s skyscrapers and, naturally, of Monas, the National Monument. Behind the luxury, a grave danger lurks, and soon engulfs Jakarta: the monetary crisis, subsequently known as ‘krismon’.

In terms of its visual aspect, the work does not reveal enough integration of drawing styles and techniques. The dialogues and comments, however, are increasingly sophisticated. The content is also more interesting, as it depicts the daily lives and struggles during the monetary crisis in Jakarta, at the time when the pressures and impacts of the crisis were felt most strongly. The problems of the weak economic fundamentals of the country, the towering debts, grafts, collusions, nepotism, all served to weaken the rupiah even further. The crisis made prices skyrocket, people went on a frenzy of panic buying, massive job losses, abandoned building projects, bank liquidations, and the “Love Rupiah” movement—all of them are present in this book. It is interesting how the book opens and closes with pictures of the strong consumptive and snobbish behavior of the Jakarta’s middle and upper classes, before and after the crisis.

The subsequent book, Reformasi (Reformation, 1998), presents excellent collaborative visual works and sophisticated dialogues and comments, and therefore serves as a high-quality sociopolitical document, with the background of the unfolding Reformation along with the pertaining social and political impacts, right from the heart of the movement: Jakarta. The book is so strong that one can almost sense that this time Benny and Mice wish to come forward as “political analysts.” Since the beginning, we can read their dialogues questioning the potency of the Reformation movement, as a year had passed but there were still no signs of progress and improvements. Through flashbacks, they then delineate the bases of the New Order’s political might and economic practices, along with the chosen path of development. They talk of the crisis that hit the country which was followed by the Reformation movement, complete with the story of the students who died during the demonstration, and the riots and looting that made Jakarta unsafe. There are also descriptions about how the students took over the parliament building, as well as the controversy regarding President Habibie, the freedom of the press, and how the politicians changed their outfits, and the mushrooming new parties. This last issue is handled more in the book (Huru-Hara) Hura-Hura Pemilu ’99 ([Chaos] Carnival of ’99 General Election), which is no less enthusiastic to appear as “political analysis” in the form of cartoons with too many words.

With the last three books, Benny and Mice certainly deserve a mention as recorders of social and political conditions in Jakarta on the eve and in the beginning of the Reformation, in the form pictures. As a work, however, the books are more like a kaleidoscope in the style of political cartoons (Picture 4). As Ray Soemantoro mentioned in the daily Sinar Harapan, April 26, 2008, the three last books of the Lagak Jakarta series published in the late nineties are “works that still seem relevant today,” but feels “encumbered with moral messages, not to say patronizing.”

In Lagak Jakarta, the duo is indeed saddled with grand ideas to present cartoons on a par with “sociological reportage,” as mentioned in the opening pages of each book in the series of Lagak Jakarta. In such a situation, there is still a chance to obtain an authentic and special experience in the tension between the individual and the social norms, but it turns out to be different: the individual is drowned within the stream of events and loses its role and feelings, so much so that the individual ends up being obliterated in commonality.

It is interesting to read into Hikmat Darmawan’s observation. He is a shrewd observer of Indonesian comics. In a review over Tita Larasati’s work, Curhat Tita: A Graphic Diary, Hikmat mentioned that “Lagak Jakarta comic […] cannot be entirely categorized as biography comic or graphic diary, as it still holds the desire to be a fictional comic.” Indeed, early on in the Lagak Jakarta series, especially in the books Transportasi and Profesi, there were cases when Benny Rachmadi revealed the idea of making comic works as a medium to delineate fully the life of the artist, or as an autobiographical work. The readers can thus enjoy the personal experience of the artist as a part of them, its critical aspect notwithstanding. A case in point is an experience typical for Jakarta citizens who come home late at night and take illegal buses or cabs, requiring a high degree of suspicions, and often ends up in silly situations. Or the experience of taking a metromini bus, forcing the tall artist to sit sideways rather than straight toward the driver but with the knees bent in awkward angles. Also the time when the artist is sitting comfortably on the bus but suddenly forced to move to a crowded bus where he becomes a mere “add-on” that can be rudely treated.

Such personal experiences, which Hikmat dubs the experiences of Benny’s “restless soul,” had appeared and should actually be asserted further in Lagak Jakarta, especially because Benny and Mice once admitted of “being very much influenced by Lat and following in his footsteps.” The Malaysian comic artist Lat employs the model of biographical comics and graphic diary as the ideology for his works. Closer by in Jakarta, long before Lat, Put On comics by Kho Wan Gie had existed, which after a closer observation would appear as the closest model for biographical comics and graphic diary. Such creative ideology appears every now and then in Benny and Mice, but it has not entirely disappeared as in 2003 it appears again by means of Kompas daily, which provides them with the opportunity to contribute their comic strip regularly to be published every Sunday. There, the duo appears not only as a pair of comic artists but also as comic characters, and their personal experiences in relation with their surrounding become the center of all the daily dramas.


BENNY & MICE: CRAZY OLD FELLOWS
Kartun Benny & Mice (Benny & Mice Cartoons) depicts Benny Rachmadi and Muh. Misrad themselves. Benny and Mice are Jakarta citizens with average looks and no attributes of a hero whatsoever. When they want to become somebody, something silly occurs. Their skinny frames also make it easy for them to be portrayed in a variety of ridiculous situations.

In terms of age, they are over thirty, more or less, or perhaps in their forties. Still, it appears that they act like, and have the characteristic of, teenagers, ever trying to be free from various norms and rules. In Jakarta, there are indeed many men who are not getting any younger, but whose attitudes are precisely those of a teenager. The Betawis even has the term ‘tubangke gile’—literally, crazy old man—to describe older men with childlike attitudes.

Tubangke gile, in any case, is something unacceptable. But it is precisely such inappropriateness that serves as the key to Benny & Mice’s success in the Kompas daily (Picture 5), because there lies the most interesting story—i.e. the depiction of the exploits of two male citizens of Jakarta who like to, in the words of the late Jakartan actor-singer Benyamin S, “asal goblek,” or do as they please. The attitude to act asal goblek, just as they please, is the consequence of the choice to become crazy old men, and it is interesting to note because it mirrors the city of Jakarta itself, which grows and develops in chaotic ways, insolently.

If one reads the two comic collections, Kartun Benny & Mice: Jakarta Luar Dalem (Benny & Mice’s Cartoons: Jakarta Inside Out) and Kartun Benny & Mice: Jakarta Atas Bawah (Benny & Mice’s Cartoons: Jakarta Upside Down), one will see how their comic universe is a world with no decency. It is entirely different from Put On. Put On, the eponymous character of the series, lives with his mother, who nags and is very disciplined, and his two little brothers who like to steal his attention and tease him. Theirs is a cubicle house with a front terrace and a small backyard, where Put On sometimes works, rests, and has most of his adventures. There are also several other characters, such as Put On’s sister, who is married and lives somewhere else, and his girlfriend Dortji. Put On works in an office with a boss who can make his life very difficult. To contrast Put On’s bachelor status with the life of a family man, he “was given” a friend, A Liuk, who often has problems with his wife.

Meanwhile, Benny and Mice are always in a disorderly situation (Picture 6). Although they always appear together, and in several instances they have been portrayed as sharing a house, they also often appear to live in different houses, and sometimes even meet as two strangers. It is interesting how Benny and Mice rarely reveal ethnicity in their universe. Their origins were never revealed, either. Benny and Mice are ‘new men,’ if not ‘city men,’ who have apparently managed—to borrow Goenawan Mohamad’s words—“to scrape his back until the remains of the past that stick like dirt are wiped out, disappearing.” There’s no Chinese, Bataks, Betawis, Sundanese, Javanese, Malays, or Bugises. In their comic strip, Jakarta is truly a melting pot.

In terms of their economic stratum, they are portrayed as members of the lower class, even the poor of Jakarta. But in some cases, they can appear well off, middle class, and even part of the Jakarta’s business elite who use cars everywhere, while their time away at cafés, or go travelling in planes. In terms of their job, one cannot say that they have fixed jobs. They both, together or separately, appear in a variety of jobs: as bosses, office workers complete with tie-and-suit and regular office hours, young executives with sophisticated mobile phones and laptops, television celebrities or popular musicians, and as low class or blue-collar workers. It is in this last category they most often appear; for example as public-toilet attendants, beggars in a cemetery, small-shop owners, motorcycle-taxi drivers, attendants in a mobile-phone shop, itinerant furniture-sellers, masseurs, ticket scalpers, sellers of Islamic garments, snack peddlers, security officers, medicine hawkers in the market, Transjakarta bus drivers, itinerant tailors, couriers, barbers, tire repairmen, gift sellers, and garbage men. It is in such situations that most of their stories and adventures take place.

If there are other characters that appear rather regularly, they are merely the Bajaj drivers and the celebrity Dian Sastro. Wife and girlfriend have not much space; in one occasion, Benny is portrayed as a married man, but soon returns to his usual partner: Mice. It is obvious here that Benny Rachmadi and Muh. Misrad are reluctant to step out of their friendship, choose to stay as crazy old men, tubangke gile, albeit eliminating therefore the opportunity to reveal something from the life of a married man with all the attending problems, which naturally will enrich their comic universe.

The two cartoonists, however, have apparently decided for their comic characters to be liberated from all things that might limit them to a set of model of living. This is apparent since the first panel, in which the title sports pictures of the duo always as different characters. To stay in the midst of the various professions, situations, and fantasies of the Jakarta urbanites seems to be their recipe that enables them to present comical ironies, although often ends up as being mere slapstick, in the style of Srimulat, which considers humor as merely the result of ‘misplacement’ and ‘quirkiness.’ Still, just as the journalist-writer Bre Redana has said, the misplacement and quirkiness still incite laughter, because Jakarta is indeed about quirks and misplaced things.

Jakarta has indeed made a lot of people end up feeling frustrated, because the city fails to be a better living place. Most of the inhabitants live helter-skelter within and with it. As a metropolis that offers cosmopolitan opportunities, however, Jakarta is still a magnet for many. Many still love Jakarta, although many also hate it or view it cynically. Many personal dreams have been fulfilled, just as many have been shattered among the losers. Collective hopes, however, are yet to be realized, although there have been so many plans and so much economic might. Many have given up, no longer hope, become angry, and others become apathetic and even antipathetic, focusing only on their own personal dreams. Plans are still being made, but they are devoid of hopes and communal spirits. Jakarta becomes an alien city. But there is no other option; sink in the city streams, or swim higgledy-piggledy, trying to adapt in order to survive. It is such situations and such people that serve as the basis for Benny and Mice’s works. From there stories are gleaned, ones that often seem ridiculous, as the reality faced by the city inhabitants is often stranger than fictions.


TALK ABOUT HAPE, TALK ABOUT CONSUMPTIVE CULTURE
If there is one thing that catches Benny and Mice’s attention the most, it is the matter of the consumptive culture in Jakarta. The capital is spot where a myriad fashion styles, ideas, and products from all over the world are mostly distributed compared to any other place in Indonesia. In this aspect, Jakarta is seen as a trading entity. This is where the consumptive culture is at its height, giving rise to snobbism.

Their works about the consumptive culture can be considered as an apt record of the era. In his book, A History of Modern Indonesia, Adrian Vickers refers to their comics to describe the consumptive behaviors among the elite prior to the economic crisis in Indonesia. For Benny and Mice, however, such consumptive culture is rife not only among the elite, but also among the lower classes. And it is precisely in the lower economic strata that ridiculous and funny “snobbish” attitudes arise. According to the duo, the majority of people in Jakarta live under the banner of “better lose weight than lose style,” “better miss the bus than miss the trend.”

Kartun Benny & Mice: Talk about Hape (Benny & Mice’s cartoons: Talk about Hand Phones), published in March 2008, is the work that can represent their whole stance regarding such phenomenon. The ‘hape’ (short for hand phone, mobile phone) has indeed become a lifestyle icon that—according to this comic—actually poses a burden for the Jakartan society. The mobile phone moves away from its original function as a means of communication. For Benny and Mice, the mobile phone serves as the most real example of how the consumptive culture has captured its prey. The lifestyle with the mobile phone is portrayed as often repressive, and even taking precedence over other needs. From the first pages, Benny and Mice have illustrated how without the mobile phone, someone in the metropolis of Jakarta might not only feel isolated and threatened, but also how using the mobile phone is akin to living on the edge, not only because one incessantly needs to buy the required credits from the service providers, but also because one feels obliged to follow the latest fashion in mobile phones.

As a book with the objective to discuss all matters regarding the mobile phones, Talk about Hape can be considered successful in conveying the message about how perilous the object can be. Realizing that the negative aspects are a lot more than the positive ones, Benny and Mice close the book with the scene in which they sell their phones to Saidi Cellular, because the phones only serve to make them—as Mice says—“way too poor.” The closing scene does reek of exaggeration, and even rather foolish and unwise, but it should not make readers lose the message they want to convey, i.e. the wish to become better.

Benny Rachmadi and Muh. Misrad have talked about the mobile phone as a symbol of true consumptive object and attitude in their first works. Even in almost all of their books, the matter of mobile phones has always received their extra attention, as can be seen in Lagak Jakarta: Trend & Prilaku, Transportasi, Profesi, and Kartun Benny & Mice: Jakarta Luar Dalem and Jakarta Atas Bawah. It is interesting how, especially in the book Jakarta Atas Bawah, the mobile phone is not merely portrayed as something negative, but also as a useful object. Seen in this context, one can say that the book Talk about Hape constitutes the peak of the discussion of the mobile phones as the symbol of true consumptive object and attitude, although one cannot conclude that it represents their final stance, and one can even say that their stance is rather ambiguous.


CLOSING REMARKS
So far, we can say that Benny Rachmadi and Muh. Misrad have created works that exist at the forefront of the Indonesian comics, if we see them in the context of their relevance to their era, especially in the context of Jakarta, a metropolis “where God is creating the Indonesians.”

Although since the beginning they have wished to create tendentious comic works, in the series of Lagak Jakarta their point of view is yet to become stable. Lagak Jakarta serves as a foreword that eventually leads them to the recipe presented in Benny dan Mice, as they try to depict the reality in Jakartan lives, in a socially and economically difficult time, in the form of comic irony. Their choice to become tubangke gile asal goblek, crazy old fellows who do as they please, represents their protests against the government and the rich elite that have left their ubiquitous mark too strongly on Jakarta. It is an act of resistance, for someone to seize their right and opportunity to have an active role in asserting their personal or communal stances and mark on Jakarta. It is in such a context that one must read the peculiar, cynical, and even rough and rowdy or subversive attitudes that often appear in their works.

Therefore—despite the fact that they are often out of breath, suffer from crises of ideas or materials, which make their work rather lacking in shrewdness—in their decade of collaboration, the citizens of Jakarta and even Indonesia can observe not only technical evolutions of the comic artists at the forefront of Indonesian comics today, but also their struggle to prove their philosophy to ensure that their works are not “more successful in conception than in execution.” It is a challenging philosophy that guides them as they become tense witnesses who try to adapt with the anxieties along the changes and growth of Jakarta as a chaotic metropolis.



Depok, December 2008
Translated by Rani Elsanti



JJ RIZAL was born in Jakarta in 1975. He studied at the Department of History at the Faculty of Letters, University of Indonesia. As he graduated in 1998, he founded Komunitas Bambu publishing house, printing mostly liberal arts books. The publishing house grew and in 2005 he established an imprint, Masup Jakarta, focusing on books about the history and literary works of Jakarta. Aside from working as a book editor, he also writes for a variety of mass media. In 2001 – 1006, he was a regular columnist about the history of Batavia-Betawi-Jakarta for the Dutch magazine, Moesson: Het Indisch Maandblad. His works have been published in the collection of essays Politik Kota Kita (Our City Politics, Kompas publishing, 2006), Onze Ong: Onghokham dalam Kenangan (Our Ong: Onghokham in Our Memories, Komunitas Bambu publishing, 2007), and Sejarah yang Memihak: Mengenang Sartono Kartodirdjo (Sided History: Remembering Sartono Kartodirdjo, Ombak publishing, 2008).