Lat & Malaysian Comics

Lat is the pen name of Datuk Mohammad Nor bin Mohammad Khalid, born on 5 March 1951 in Kota Bharu, a village in the Gopeng area of the Kinta Valley in Perak. He grew up in tin-mining country, the rural world that would later fill his most famous pages. Now in his mid-70s, he is widely regarded as one of Malaysia's foremost and most influential cartoonists.

He started young. He published comic strips as a teenager in the mid-1960s, and his early comic booklet Tiga Sekawan dates to 1964. In the early 1970s he joined Berita Harian as a reporter covering crime and general news. In 1974 he was appointed a staff cartoonist at the New Straits Times (NST), where he launched his signature series, Scenes of Malaysian Life. That series ran for decades, into the 2010s, and made him a household name by gently satirising Malaysian society, politics, and daily life across every ethnic community. He went freelance in 1984 while continuing to contribute to the NST.

His cartoons are affectionate in tone, portraying kampung life, food, family, and multicultural friendship. Over his career he has published more than twenty cartoon collections, and his work has become a shared reference point for several generations.

Lat's reputation rests above all on The Kampung Boy (1979), an autobiographical graphic novel about a Malay boy's childhood in a rural Perak kampung tied to tin-mining country. It became an international success, translated and published in many countries, including a United States edition from the First Second imprint. It is frequently cited as one of the most important Southeast Asian graphic novels.

The sequel, Town Boy, follows the same boy as an adolescent moving to the town of Ipoh, capturing multicultural urban friendship (notably with a Chinese friend, Frankie) and teenage life. Related nostalgic works include Mat Som (1989) and Kampung Boy: Yesterday and Today, all championing older Malaysian ways of living.

The Kampung Boy and its sequel Town Boy are the most widely read starting points for readers new to Lat's work.

The Kampung Boy graphic novel was adapted into a 26-episode animated television series. The pilot aired on TV1 on 10 February 1997, and the series later ran on Astro (Ria). It was a large and expensive production, costed at roughly USD 350,000 per episode, part-funded by Measat Broadcast Network Systems and made with international animation partners.

The series travelled far. It was broadcast in more than sixty countries through distributors, reaching networks such as Teletoon in Canada and Kinder Channel in Germany. In 1999 the episode titled Oh! Tok won a special Annecy Award for a long-format animated episode, associated with the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.

One common mix-up is worth clearing up: the Kampung Boy series was produced with international partners, a different studio from Les' Copaque, which made Upin & Ipin. The two are often confused online. The Kampung Boy animation was an early effort to bring a Malaysian comic to an international children's audience, and for many Malaysians who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the cartoon was their first door into Lat's world before they ever picked up the book.

Lat's recognition has grown from newspaper fame into formal national honour. In 1994 the Sultan of Perak awarded him the Datuk title, recognising his role in promoting social harmony through his gently unifying cartoons. In 2002 he won the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in Japan, a regional award for cultural contribution.

More recently, his standing has been elevated further. He was named Seniman Diraja (Royal Artist), bestowed in 2023, and recognised with a National Artist honour in 2024.

These honours matter because they treat cartooning as serious cultural work. For decades, comics were dismissed as light entertainment. Lat's career, and the respect it now commands at the highest levels of Malaysian society, helped change that view for every artist who came after him.

Lat did not appear from nowhere. Modern Malaysian cartooning had foundations laid in the 1950s and 1960s by an earlier generation, and the key figure is Rejabhad. His real name was Rejab bin Had, born on 23 August 1939 in Permatang Pauh, Penang, and he died on 14 November 2002 at the age of 63.

Rejabhad began his career in the 1950s, mentored by the earlier cartoonist Rashidin. He served in the Malaysian Army before becoming a full-time cartoonist. By some accounts he edited the magazine Ha Hu Hum around 1974, and in 1978 he joined the influential humour magazine Gila-Gila, published by Creative Enterprise. His best-known series was Periwira Mat Gila, which ran across multiple volumes.

He was widely dubbed Raja Kartun Malaysia, the King of Malaysian Cartoons, and he mentored generations of cartoonists from the 1950s through to 2000. Some accounts describe Lat as having been encouraged by Rejabhad early in his career, though this link is not firmly documented in the main reference sources. Either way, understanding Rejabhad helps explain how a mass audience for local, Malay-language cartoons already existed by the time Lat and the magazine boom arrived.

The modern Malay-language comics industry was built on humour and satire magazines. Gila-Gila, launched on 1 April 1978 by publisher Creative Enterprise, is widely credited with popularising the genre and building a mass market for local comics. It became a training ground for a whole generation of kartunis.

Its breakout star was the cartoonist Ujang, the pen name of Ibrahim Anon. He rose through Gila-Gila, then left to found his own teen-oriented magazine, Ujang, in 1993 under Syarikat Kharisma. His most enduring creation, Usop Sontorian, began as a comic strip inside Ujang magazine, became a standalone title, and then became one of Malaysia's first home-grown animated TV series, airing on TV1 across 1996 and 1997 and produced by Kharisma Pictures. That made it an early comic-to-animation crossover well before the CGI era.

Ujang's later story carries a bittersweet note. By 2025, press coverage framed him as a pioneer who lost the rights to some of his own creations and had to reinvent himself. His journey captures both the creative energy and the business fragility of the magazine boom. For readers who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, these magazines were weekly companions, passed around classrooms and sundry shops, and they are remembered fondly as part of Malaysian pop culture.

The next big shift came in 1998. Gempak, which debuted on 1 June 1998 from publisher Art Square Creation, moved the scene from pure humour toward the Japanese-influenced ACG world of Anime, Comics, and Games. It is described as Malaysia's first info-comic magazine, blending comics with news and articles, and that formula drove its success.

The publisher, Art Square Group, later diversified from advertising into publishing. In December 2015 Japan's Kadokawa Corporation took an 80 percent stake in the group, and in January 2016 it was renamed Kadokawa Gempak Starz (KGS), today a major graphic-novel and manga publisher. KGS became the main incubator of Malaysian manga-style artists.

Kaoru is a leading example, described as the first full-time Chinese-Malaysian female cartoonist at the company, joining shortly after graduating in 2001. Her ornate, manga-influenced Candy and Prince series (from 2013) and romance works won Malaysian Mandarin Comic Society awards. These titles are typically published in Mandarin first, then translated into Malay and English, which reflects how multilingual the Malaysian comics market really is.

The 2000s and 2010s brought a clear generational shift online. Around 2008 there were fewer than ten Malaysian webcomic artists, mostly on Blogspot. The Facebook and Webtoon era then made the scene too large to track, as self-publishing and social platforms lowered the barrier to reaching readers.

Several indie figures stand out. Fishball built a large following with autobiographical humour and became a LINE Webtoon featured artist with international reach. Reimena Yee, born in Kuala Lumpur and now based in Melbourne, has earned wide recognition, including Eisner and Dwayne McDuffie nominations and a 2022 Ignatz Award, and she co-founded the Southeast Asian collective UNNAMED and the Cartoonist Cooperative.

Holding the community together are fan conventions, above all Comic Fiesta, founded in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur. By 2024 it drew around 73,000 visitors and featured more than 550 artists in its art market, making it the main showcase for local independent creators. If the magazine era was about a handful of big publishers, the webcomic era is about many small voices, from politically themed strips documented by outlets such as R.AGE to slice-of-life humour, all reaching readers directly through their phones.

Malaysia's celebrated animation industry grew directly out of its comics tradition, and the family tree is easy to follow. Lat's The Kampung Boy graphic novel led to the Kampung Boy animated series, an idea reportedly seeded in a 1993 conversation between Lat and businessman Ananda Krishnan. From there, a cluster of studios helped build Malaysia's animation industry.

Several of these studios trace their founders back to Les' Copaque. Animonsta (later rebranded Monsta) was founded in 2009 by Nizam Razak and partners after leaving Les' Copaque, and WAU Animation in Cyberjaya was founded by Usamah Zaid Yasin and partners along a similar path. WAU's Ejen Ali: The Movie 2 (2025) became the highest-earning Malaysian animated film at around RM55.1m. Many of these animators drew on storytelling traditions developed in Malaysian comics.