a startlingly brilliant tour de force ... At once dizzyingly meta and deeply heartfelt, the book spans 80 years and in its complicated layering remind me of everything from Maus and The Tin Drum to, believe it or not, Ulysses ... Liew himself creates them all, both naive and sophisticated, with dazzling virtuosity. Man, can this guy draw ... probably the greatest work of art ever produced in Singapore.
[Singapore's] progress has had costs as well as benefits. Sonny Liew’s brilliantly inventive The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye weighs those costs and benefits. Graphic novelists have made a mark in politics: Marjane Satrapi with Iran and Joe Sacco with Palestine are two of the most admired. The latest experiment in political storytelling through graphic art explores Singapore’s history through the career of Charlie, a fictional cartoonist, which begins in the mid-1950s when Singapore was still a British colony. The book is a series of interviews with Charlie, beginning in 2010, when he is 72 years old. Charlie is mild but steel-spined, observant and proud; with masterful economy of detail—an arched eyebrow here, his head at a resigned angle there—Mr Liew crafts him into a fully realised character.
[Liew is] a master of basically any style of cartooning—from Pogo-style funny animals to Mad Magazine satire to commercial caricature to wartime adventure to gekiga manga. The result is a multilayered masterpiece of comic-book and real-world history, a portrait of the postwar world made in a thrilling postmodern style. It’s funny and rich and satisfying, and one of the best comics of the year.
a hugely ambitious, stylistically acrobatic work by the Singapore-based cartoonist Sonny Liew ... Charlie Chan Hock Chye is Liew’s invention, and his fictional life story is the vehicle for both a political history of Singapore’s past seven decades and Liew’s visual homages to comics’ most commercially successful innovations ... Visually, the book is a mercurial delight, constantly switching between Liew’s invented narrative (in a relatively neutral nonfiction style), images of Chan Hock Chye’s works in progress over the course of his career and mock-weathered clippings from his printed creations ... The final sections of the book are somewhat scattered; Liew seems to be driving at some point about modernity in both Singapore and comics, and doesn’t quite get there, although the witty visual allusions keep flying by.
As a character Charlie isn’t very memorable—perhaps the story’s greatest misstep—and few if any pieces of dialogue remain with you. But through Charlie’s personal works, readers are treated to something wholly original in graphic storytelling. We get to see these unpublished stories. We become Charlie’s secret readership. As the 'presenter' of this story, Sonny Liew draws in various styles and mixed-media to create a sense of wonder. The book enchanted me in such a way that I questioned if Charlie is based on a real historic figure ... [Liew] demonstrates an almost inhuman amount and diversity of skill. Like any great creator, he has stepped aside so his creation can live a life of its own ... Ultimately, Sonny Liew has compiled a work of fiction so innovative and thoughtful that even the most observant reader can’t distinguish fact from fiction, biography from creation, memory from truth.
His transformation is virtuosic. First, Liew had to make his book look like a real dossier of an artist's work. His results are perfectly believable ... It's his versatility, though, that's really dazzling. Also enjoyable is his ability to acerbically polemicize Singaporean history stretching back to World War II ... The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye mourns all the creators who have never been permitted to thrive in Singapore. Liew's own existence seems to be evidence of a change.
Delivering a hyper-political work that seamlessly blends the life and art of the fictional Chan, Liew audaciously rises to the challenge ... Conceptually, the work is bold and inventive, and it sees Liew jumping from aesthetic to aesthetic. Readers familiar with his other work will recognize his knobby figurework: anatomically exaggerated characters composed of thin lines and situated against detailed backgrounds. But effectively emulating Jack Kirby and Osamu Tezuka, Liew also demonstrates a natural facility with a number of storytelling idioms and a chameleonic ability to move from one to the other ... The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye displays the full breadth of Liew’s cartooning and formal ambition. Here, Liew positions himself as not just an artist to watch but a cartoonist to watch—someone whose illustrative skills are neck and neck with his writing.
...a sharp and canny graphic novel ... The real hero of this book is Singapore, and this is Sonny Liew’s love letter to his country ... Part of the cleverness of this book is that Liew is creating an underground history where one never existed, hacking together the seeds of the kind of counter-culture that critics like [William] Gibson fault Singapore for lacking ... Liew’s art is stellar throughout, a bold presentation that is graphically fearless. Echoing early masters is one thing, but building them inside of compelling stories that are part of a larger narrative 'presented by' the artist is a balancing act, and Liew delivers with aplomb.
