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Kampung Boy
by Lat
First Second, New York, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-59643-121-8

I would not consider my self a voracious reader of graphic novels, but when I hear about one that strikes my interest, I can't resist. Two graphic novels have recently come across my radar screen as ones needing to be read by me because of my connection to them. 1) Kampung Boy 2) American Born Chinese (which I reviewed briefly here).

I picked up both of these because I grew up overseas. I went to boarding school in Malaysia (the setting for Kampung Boy), and I remember what is was like to feel like an outsider in America (premise of American Born Chinese).

I found Kampung Boy easy to read because of it's larger pictures and paragraphs of text chunked together. Sometimes I think graphic novels can get so busy on the page. This one was not.

I love the details about village life--both the true and the funny. Lat, the author/illustrator, really brings the culture of his home village to reluctant readers. While I really love some of the novels and poetry written about Asia and growing up overseas, male students in my classroom may not be inclined to read them. A copy of Kampung Boy, however, would be well read.

My love of Kampung Boy is strong and true. So when I saw the three part interview done with its creator Lat (real name Mohammed Nor Khalid) on the First Second blog, I was hooked.

Here is the first,
the second.
and the third.

The interviews draw some nice correlations between Lat's work with that of Carl Giles and talk about Lat's influences. Not too surprisingly, one of them is Ralph Steadman. There's also info on a Kampung Boy animated series (those of you with Malaysian television feeds can let me know if it was any good) to say nothing of his attachment to David Niven. For those of us eagerly awaiting the upcoming Town Boy (Kampung Boy's sequel), this comes as a necessarily substitute.