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The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye tops Eisner Award nominations

SINGAPORE — Graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye may have had Government funding pulled from the project in 2015, but despite that early setback, it has gone on to wild success.

Sonny Liew has six Will Eisner Comic Industry Award nominations for his graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Photo: Sonny Liew

Sonny Liew has six Will Eisner Comic Industry Award nominations for his graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Photo: Sonny Liew

SINGAPORE — Graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye may have had Government funding pulled from the project in 2015, but despite that early setback, it has gone on to wild success.

Local illustrator Sonny Liew has now topped the nominations for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards 2017, dubbed the Oscars of comics.

The novel is nominated in six categories: Best Graphic Album (New), Best US Edition of International Material (Asia), Best Writer/Artist, Best Colouring, Best Lettering and Best Publication Design. The nominations were announced yesterday.

Mr Liew, 42, said that he was elated that “the committee felt the book worked on several levels — art, writing, book design and more, which is gratifying because you always hope a story can combine all the different elements of the comics language to tell a good story”. News of the nominations “filled (me) with delusions of grandeur for a few seconds”, he quipped.

The nominees will now be voted on by comic-book industry professionals, and the results will be announced in an awards ceremony on July 21 at the annual Comic Convention International (Comic-Con) in San Diego.

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye was published by Epigram Books in Singapore in 2015, and subsequently by Pantheon Books in the United States. It was on the Economist’s Best Book of the Year list last year (2016), as well as The Washington Post’s Best Graphic Novels of 2016. It also bagged the Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction in July — the first time the prize went to a graphic novel.

The publication caused a stir when the National Arts Council withdrew an S$8,000 publishing grant for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye in May 2015 due to “sensitive content” on the eve of its Singapore launch in 2015. The work follows the story of fictional artist Charlie Chan during the formative years of Singapore’s modern history.

It includes events and personalities in the nation’s history, such as Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, opposition politician Lim Chin Siong and Operation Spectrum, the so-called Marxist Conspiracy, in 1987.

Asked about the fracas now, and Malaysia-born Liew said that “the publishing grant withdrawal was about politics rather than artistic merit". Liew felt that at the time, the NAC "chose not to take that merit into account when making their decision".

The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye had earlier run into grant issues, when the Media Development Authority (MDA) reduced a S$115,000 grant for the publication of five graphic novels by Epigram — among them The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. The MDA said then that “due to production delays, Mr Liew’s book could not be completed on time. Hence, Epigram and MDA agreed to withdraw Mr Liew’s book from the grant”.

Liew said wryly that the “MDA grant withdrawal wasn’t about artistic merit either — in that case their system couldn’t compute the idea that a book could take longer than a year to complete”.

Liew — who has worked for DC and Marvel Comics — admitted The Art of Charlie Chan has given him quite a ride.

“Only in my wildest dreams would I have thought I’d get a book published by Pantheon, or have it reviewed on NPR and in the Economist, or get several Eisner nominations.”

Previously nominated for the Eisner awards was Singapore artist Andrew Tan.

His Moving Forward, a tale found in his book Monsters, Miracles and Mayonnaise, was up for Best Short Story in 2013.

Liew has been invited to attend the Comic-Con awards gala, but has also been invited to attend panels and appear for signings at various booths at the San Diego Convention Centre.

The writer is hoping that this level of recognition will help the literary arts in Singapore as a whole.

“There are so many different parts involved in trying to build a more vibrant book and comics industry here in Singapore,” he said.

“Maybe it is just about moving a few levers here and there, forward a little. As with the recent news about Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows being featured on the BBC, or Mr Kiasu’s commercial success back in the day — every piece of good news helps in the struggle.”

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