Kampung Boy back

Childhood favourite of Eddie Campbell's daughter Hayley and much admired by Matt Groening, KAMPUNG BOY follows the idyllic childhood of young Mat, surrounded by a loving Muslim traditions and a rural rubber estate in 1950s' Malaysia, from birth through early schooling to the triumph of exams that look set to lead him to the dubious pleasures of an unfamiliar township boarding school.

The cartooning is great fun. Mat's a fuzzy mop of hair on top of set of grinning teeth, whilst his Aunt Khatijah, flattening the coagulated rubber, thunders up and down on it with a fag in her mouth like a Les-Dawson-in-drag version of Popeye, and his Dad, built like an enormous pillow, removes his shirt after work to rub his back against the house's wooden supports like Balloo in The Jungle Book. When the boys on an expedition dive under the water, Lat captures the exhilaration and the magic under the water's surface, and you can't help but think his world's a better place than ours when playground chatter is all about fishing and swimming rather than texting each other the latest celebutard gossip.