It’s a Saturday afternoon at a major bookstore in the Gardens Mall in Kuala Lumpur. A small crowd has gathered for a session with Malaysian cartoonist Zunar.
Zunar, looking dapper in a black jacket, is candid as he speaks. His jokes elicit a lot of heavy laughter.
“If you look at my books now, they have ISBN numbers,” says the cartoonist with a broad smile, while picking up a copy of his newest cartoon collection Ketawa Pink Pink.
“In the past, they didn’t have those. I have ‘ISPH’ numbers. Because for me, ISBN stood for ‘I Support BN’. And I said ‘No, no, I don’t want that!’”
In this era of Malaysia Baru, Zunar is finally seeing his politically-slanted cartoon collections, available in bookshops nationwide.
Six of his titles – all nicely stacked up on a frontrow rack – were on sale at this recent autograph session, including the controversial Sapuman: Man Of Steal (2015), which only had its ban for seditious content in October 2017 lifted by the Home Ministry early last month.
For Zunar, Sapuman: Man Of Steal is just one of his banned books. In July 2010, his cartoon collections 1 Funny Malaysia and Perak Darul Kartun were banned by the previous government for allegedly having content that could “threaten public order and can influence people to riot.”
Read the complete report on Star2.
ArtsEquator Radar features articles and posts drawn from local and regional websites and publications – aggregated content from outside sources, so we are exposed to a multitude of voices in the region.
