THE METAFICTIONAL ART OF CHARLIE CHAN HOCK CHYE: INTERTEXTUAL DIALOGUES IN A GRAPHIC NARRATIVE

Abstract

There are different resources explored by contemporary narratives addressed to young people. In this sphere is the graphic narrative The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a work with historical, social, and artistic relevance which constitutes the corpus of this study. The objective is, from a metafictional perspective of the verbal, imagetic, and graphic, to understand how Liew’s multimodal work encourages the reader to know the backstage of this and other books, promoting the fading of the boundaries between the real and the fictional. Besides that, we will highlight how the author approaches, simultaneously, the history of Singapore and the fictional biography of a reputed cartoonist, paying homage to the art of comics. For this, we start from the theories of metafiction (Hutcheon, 1984; Waugh, 1988), intertextuality (Genette, 2006), and the language of comics (Postema, 2021).

Keywords
Sonny Liew; Metafiction; Metafictional strategies; Comics; History