Town Boy by Lat

In the follow-up volume to Kampung Boy, Lat's hero moves to the town of Ipoh with his family and attends school there. His family moves to be with him, and they move into a low-cost housing project together so that Mat never has to be far from home or live at the school boarding house.

It's here in Ipoh that Mat meets Frankie, a Chinese boy who becomes his greatest friend. They bond over a love of music, and Frankie's ownership of a record player through which they are exposed to some of the music greats: Bill Halley, The Beatles, Elvis, and so on.

But in school, while Frankie excels in all his courses, Mat is about two years behind in most of his. The only courses that truly make him happy are Art and Arts and Crafts. But as they grow older, Mat and Frankie become attracted to the most beautiful girl in Ipoh, Normah. She is so beautiful that they are dry-mouthed and fumble-tongued around her, and everytime they try to speak with her, they fail to get anywhere.

But when Normah approaches Mat for help with her art skills, will Mat have any kind of chance with this beautiful girl? Or will his own fumbling bring any romance to a screeching halt? With his good friend Frankie headed off to London to take his last semester in school and his "A" Levels, Mat must resign himself to losing the best friend he's ever had.

I liked this book. The crude style of "Kampung Boy" is the same here, and while I still don't love it, I have grown more used to it and don't find it so ugly any more. But the art does submerge you in a time and place, and the caricatures of the people around the main character (Mat is a bit of a caricature himself) brings the city, with all of its beauty, ugliness, business and calm, to life. Only Normah is drawn in a style distinct from the characters around her, making her beauty truly stand out.

We get to see less of Mat's family in this volume, and more of Frankie and the kids Mat knows from school, aside from a scene where Mat tries to convince his father to buy a record player, they don't show up at all in this book, and the book cuts from Mat's 11th year to his 17th for most of the story, but still manages to convey the passage of time and growing up.

This book has more in common with avant-garde, "indie" comics than that of mainstream comics, but that just lets the experience of growing up in Malaysia stand out. Its as if Lat's style stands for Malaysian influence, and reading the comic brings some of that home to the reader through the fairly strange art style. While I wouldn't purchase this comic myself, it does manage to convey a very different sense of place and time, and in that it stands out from other comics.