Benny & Mice - Indonesian Cartoonist

I think it is a common thing all over the world that the Sunday paper has comic strips. One of the comics that I look forward to every Sunday in Kompas (one of Indonesia's major newspaper) is a cartoon called "Benny & Mice".

Unlike normal comic strips which is drawn by 1 cartoonist, Benny & Mice is drawn by 2 people : Benny Rachmadi & Muhammad "Mice" Misrad (notice the resemblance between the cartoonists & the comic characters? Photo courtesy of an article from the Jakarta Post).

Benny & Mice

They have been friends since college (at IKJ "Institut Kesenian Jakarta" = Jakarta Art Institute), where they started drawing together on a wall space allocated by the college.

Before drawing for Kompas, they already published "Lagak Jakarta" (Jakarta Style), a series of 6 books depicting their observations of events & actions of people in Jakarta. These observations extended into the two characters, Benny & Mice, where they first appeared in the fourth Lagak Jakarta book.

Benny & Mice itself first appeared in Kompas in 2003. Since then, they have gain wider popularity. The cartoon portrays what is going on in Jakarta specifically and Indonesia in general. Below is a sample of the Benny & Mice comic strip :

People in Jakarta would remember this scene, when Breadtalk, a bakery franchise, had just opened and people would line-up for hours in order to buy it (when I actually saw this, I thought these people were either mad or real bread fanatics!). They could have simply bought other bread brands (although Breadtalk lovers would claim that the taste is worth the effort), as what Benny & Mice eventually did in the comic. (Notice the last box where Benny asks for bread with Abon, presumably Breadtalk's most hot selling variant....so funny!)

This is another example which I could relate to since I have old relatives back in my village who claim they are healthy even though they have been smoking since young. *Note: I am actually against smoking*

Since then, Benny & Mice have also published another book called "100 Tokoh yang mewarnai Jakarta" (100 characters who color Jakarta) and also a compilation book of their drawings in Kompas, called "Jakarta Luar Dalem".