{"id":43825,"date":"2025-03-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=43825"},"modified":"2025-03-13T11:05:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T18:05:43","slug":"cow-boy-the-art-of-charlie-chan-hock-chye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/cow-boy-the-art-of-charlie-chan-hock-chye\/","title":{"rendered":"Cow Boy \/ The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

COW BOY \u2013 DON\u2019T MESS WITH THIS 10-YEAR-OLD BOUNTY HUNTER ARMED WITH A HOBBY HORSE POP GUN<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse<\/em>
by Nate Cosby
Archaia
2015, 112 pages, 6 x 9 x 0.3 inches (softcover)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy on Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boyd Linney, also known as the Cow Boy, is a 10-year old bounty hunter. Armed with a custom pop gun in the shape of a hobby horse, he roams the West in search of wanted criminals. Unfortunately, they just happen to be his relatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cinematic western about a 10-year-old bounty hunter, Cow Boy: A Boy And His Horse<\/em> is action-packed, kid-friendly, and surprisingly gritty. Light on dialogue, where guttural utterances and highfalutin\u2019 25-cent words like dadgummit, tarnation, and goldarnt are sprinkled amidst desert landscapes and frontier saloon interiors, each colorful panel dramatizes a simple Wild West story of a boy in search of his wayward, outlaw family, and he\u2019ll find them at any cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breaking up the storyline are brief, humorous vignettes, one of a gunslinger with no underpants, a laser gun showdown with enormous steampunk robots, a woman who walks miles through the desert to accept a marriage proposal from an outlaw, and a gun-toting heroine with a penguin as a sidekick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Propelled by Peanuts-like drawings that evoke a Sergio Leone-esque, widescreen atmosphere, this graphic novel features a compelling tale that touches on themes of family, loneliness, slavery, abuse, and gumption that never feels heavy-handed. Appropriate for all ages, Cow Boy: A Boy And His Horse<\/em> is an entertaining page-turner that gallops along. \u2013 S.Deathrage<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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THE ART OF CHARLIE CHAN HOCK CHYE \u2013 BUT JUST WHO IS THIS GREAT SINGAPOREAN COMIC ARTIST?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye<\/em>
by Pantheon Graphic Novels
Pantheon
2016, 320 pages, 7 x 1.2 x 10.4 inches (hardcover)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy on Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye<\/em> is one of the most intricate and impressive graphic novels I\u2019ve ever read. It\u2019s a biography of the great Singaporean comic artist Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and traces the evolution of Chan\u2019s career by showing the wide array of artistic styles he experimented with. These range from Marvel-style superhero comics to celebrity caricatures, cartoonish science fiction, manga, noir, and more. All this is complemented by explanations and annotations of Chan\u2019s work, which are also presented in graphic form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work is complex not only in style, but also in content. A driving theme throughout Chan\u2019s career has been uncompromising political satire. Thus the survey of Chan\u2019s work is also a dense and dizzying tour of 20th-century Singaporean history. The comics depict the complex Singaporean identity following independence from Britain, as the tiny nation-state struggled to define itself ethnically, politically, and economically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this is a weighty topic, there\u2019s an ever-present humor in Chan\u2019s comics. For instance, his superhero parody is called Roachman. Roachman worked as a human waste collector in Singapore\u2019s pre-plumbing period, and gained his powers from the bite of a cockroach. His transformation into a superhero allows for commentary on the social ills of the day, as well as providing a snapshot of a country just before rapid urbanization and development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big conceit in all this is that Chan isn\u2019t real. He\u2019s a fictional character invented by Sonny Liew to take readers through a simultaneous history of Singapore and of 20th-century comics. One lasting impression from this book is that it must have been so fun to create: inventing not only an artist, but also his works, and the additional meta-layer of being a faux biographer\/art historian. Only someone with an enduring love of comics could have produced this work. \u2013 Christine Ro<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books That Belong On Paper<\/strong>\u00a0first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair.<\/em>\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to get the issues a week early in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Issue No. 58<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13684,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[31],"tags":[2398],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43825"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13684"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43844,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43825\/revisions\/43844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}