Author: Satya Em [ Lim Santepheap & John Weeks ; editors : ] [ Sieng Sothearwat ; translator :]
Title: Flower of Battambang
Description: Phnom Penh, Our Books, n.d. [2006?]. orig. wrappers. 20x14cm, 100 pages. Chiefly illustrations. A Cambodian graphic novel, entirely in English. Cover title.. ISBN: 978995085346. Minor wear. VG. ¶ ["Em Satya is better known as Nono, the political cartoonist for Rasmei Kampuchea. However he has been working on Cambodian comic since the 1960s. He's noted for his 'clear line' drawing style..." - from Pulp Librarian twitter thread, Jun 5, 2020] ["Flower of Battambang is his first book in the graphic novel format, though I'll confess I was a bit more taken by the disclosure that the story was influenced in parts by both Cambodian classical art and Indian cinema...The art in Flower of Battambang, particularly its early pages, displays a pretty striking grasp of simple page design; I don't think there's a single page in the story with more than four panels on it, so an illustrative, almost poster-like aesthetic prevails. Per his bio, it took Satya over a decade and a half to finish the story; initially nobody was interested in publishing the work he'd completed, and then he suffered a stroke, and essentially taught himself to draw again in the process of completing the book. There is indeed a noticeable shift in drawing among different pages -- of course, I have no idea in which sequence the pages were completed -- where both the figure work dials back in detail to a more gestural feel, and, at other times, the pages become dominated by splash images bedecked with explanatory text,with characters showing a heavier shading attributed to the artist's latter-day interests..." - Joe McCulloch in "This week in comics 11/21/12 (The Comics Journal)].

Keywords: 978995085346 Cambodia, Graphic Novels, Comic Books, Popular Literature, Pulp Fiction, Khmer, Southeast Asia, Romance,