Southeast Asia Library Group Newsletter No. 54 / Dec 2022 44 Malay Comic Books from the 1950s and 1960s in the British Library Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator for Southeast Asia, The British Library, London Introduction In 2017, the Malaysia Cartoon and Comic House (Rumah Kartun dan Komik Malaysia) opened in the Lake Gardens in Kuala Lumpur. On display were over 500 cartoons and comic books, dating from the mid-1930s to the late 1990s, including works by Mal aysia’s best-loved cartoonist Lat (whose real name is Mohamad Noor Khalid, born in 1951). This new institution is a visible manifestation of the wide and longstanding public interest in Malay comic art over many decades, more recently magnified through th e influence of Japanese manga. The name of the institution, ‘Malaysia Cartoon and Comic House’ rather than ‘Malaysia Comic and Cartoon House’ is also significant, for Malay cartoons have a longer history than comics. The first cartoons started appearing in the 1930s, and have attracted considerable attention especially for their political comment, as explored in Zakiah Hanum’s anthology (1995) and Muliyadi Mahamood’s Ph.D. thesis (1997), as well as more recent studies by scholars such as Lim Cheng Tju (2022) and John Lent (1994). In a pioneering article published in Kekal Abadi in 1984, Zainab Awang Ngah drew attention to the more neglected genre of Malay comic books. A comic or comic book can be defined as a printed volume containing a narrative told in comic strips. Each comic strip consists of a sequence of frames or panels, each frame comprising a picture or illustration with accompanying text. The text or dialogue can either take the form of speech bubbles or captions placed above or below the picture, or a combination of the two text forms. Unlike Malay cartoons which had been published in newspapers and magazines during the pre-war period, the first Malay comic books only appeared in the early 1950s. Many of the early comic writers and illustrators were trained as teachers, and the stories were usually didactic in nature, and were aimed at teenager or adults rather than children. The most popular subjects in the 1950s were Malay historical and folk tales, usually adaptations from Sejarah Melayu, Hikayat Hang Tuah (see Putten and Barnard 2007) and other well-known works, and during this decade, the majority of comics were published in Malay written in Jawi (Arabic) script. During the 1960s, in line with broader societal developments, Malay comics are mostly in roman script, and the emphasis shifts to love stories and detective thrillers, where the kampung is seen as the repository of good moral values, while towns are depicted as a source of depravity and corruption. In many ways, Malay comics can be seen as a mirror of wider trends in Malay language and literature issues. At the time of writing, Zainab had identified 163 titles of Malay comic books in the library of the University Malaya (UM), of which 26 were published in the 1950s and 128 in the 1960s, with seven in the 1970s and only three in the early 1980s, and her article focused on the earliest Malay comics of the 1950s. As Zainab pointed out, studies on the development and growth of Malay literature have generally avoided any mention of