The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew

In 1959, pre-dating Marvel Comics’ revival of the superhero genre, they created Roachman, which could have inspired Spider-man. Trying to emulate the success of the UK comic weekly, Eagle, their attempt to create Dragon, Singapore’s National Strip Cartoon Weekly, Dragon, did not take off. He drew a comic about that and teamed up with writer Bertrand Wong to create an EC Comics-inspired war comic title, Force 136, which tackled stories about the Japanese Occupation and the Malayan Emergency.

A few months later, he was an eyewitness (见证人) to the 513 incident, the student protest against conscription on May 13, 1954, which marked the start of the postwar student movement in Singapore. He was influenced by Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, and drew his own boy and robot story for his first comic story in 1954 at the age of 16. The book adopts the format of art books (ala The Art of Jack Kirby and ilk) and tells the story of the ‘greatest comic artist in Singapore’, Charlie Chan Hock Chye, who never was.Ĭharlie Chan grew up reading and dreaming about drawing comics. The pudding, as they say, is in the telling. The hype should not distract us from the fact that The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is an ambitious, innovative work by an artist who has been experimenting with the medium since the late 2000s. Controversy sells and there is no such thing as bad news in pop culture. Some cynics joked that this was the strategy to take – apply for a NAC grant and then get ‘degranted’ to receive even more publicity. In hindsight, NAC has done Liew and Epigram Books a favour as the press coverage about the book was worth more than S$8,000. The press coverage over this matter led to more curiosity about the book, surging it up the local bestseller charts and it has since gone into its third printing within 3 months, an unprecedented event in Singapore publishing.Īt the time of writing, about 3,000 copies of the book have been sold. This caused an uproar among the arts community and civil society groups and it was reported overseas as well. After the book was on sale for about a month in Singapore, NAC ‘degranted’ it, citing the politically sensitive content of the book and reclaimed the amount given out. Secondly, the book was originally given a publication grant of S$8,000 by the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC).

France and Italian editions are to follow. Firstly, it was picked up by Pantheon Books for publication in the US and UK for 2016, the first Singapore graphic novel to have its rights bought by a major Western publisher. The Singapore graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Epigram Books, 2015), written and drawn by Sonny Liew, was reported in the news recently.

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew