The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. By Sonny Liew. Pantheon; 320 pages; $30.

WHAT sort of country is Singapore? Westerners who live there get used to being asked two questions whenever they go home: “Can you chew gum?” and “Have you been caned yet?”

These foreigners may be familiar with “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”, a scathing essay that William Gibson wrote in 1993, depicting the Lion City as a soulless, consumerist, authoritarian wasteland. Yet to much of the developing world, Singapore is a model. It is politically stable and geopolitically independent; its citizens enjoy a high standard of living and all the trappings—but not much more than the trappings—of democracy. To its politicians and defenders, Singapore is an achievement born of self-sacrifice, hard work and committed multiculturalism (for instance, public-housing blocks, where most Singaporeans live, must reflect the ethnic make-up of the country: “There are no segregated ghettos in Singapore,” its prime minister boasted in a speech last year).

Like any other country, Singapore means different things to different people. Its detractors admit that modern Singapore is safe, well-run and has achieved remarkable material progress since it became independent just over 50 years ago. And even its defenders admit that Singapore restricts civil liberties (for good reason, in their view), and that its progress has had costs as well as benefits.

Sonny Liew’s brilliantly inventive “The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye” weighs those costs and benefits. Graphic novelists have made a mark in politics: Marjane Satrapi with Iran and Joe Sacco with Palestine are two of the most admired. The latest experiment in political storytelling through graphic art explores Singapore’s history through the career of Charlie, a fictional cartoonist, which begins in the mid-1950s when Singapore was still a British colony.

The book is a series of interviews with Charlie, beginning in 2010, when he is 72 years old. Charlie is mild but steel-spined, observant and proud; with masterful economy of detail—an arched eyebrow here, his head at a resigned angle there—Mr Liew crafts him into a fully realised character.

Charlie’s first published comic is a fairly standard mid-century science-fiction tale in which a boy and his dog discover a giant robot hidden in a cave. But his work quickly turns political. The boy and his dog find themselves embroiled in an anti-colonial demonstration. British police attack unarmed students, but the robot, who responds only to commands in Chinese, steps in to save the day.

Lee Kuan Yew, who founded the People’s Action Party (PAP) in 1954 and won his first parliamentary seat a year later, makes an early appearance in Chan’s work in “Invasion”. The series depicts humanity under the rule of an alien race, the Hegemons. Mr Lee is a lawyer who argues for human self-rule and speaks fluent Hegemonese (“Invasion” is, of course, an allegory, with humans representing Singaporeans and Hegemons the British). Charlie also uses allegory to tell the story of Singapore’s failed merger with the Federation of Malaya in the early 1960s, with Mr Lee as Sang Kancil, a mouse-deer figure from Malaysian folk tales who lives by his wits; the British as Sir Lion, the Malayan prime minister as a kindly orang-utan.

Charlie’s versions of Mr Lee grow steadily more Machiavellian. By 1983 he is “Mr Hairily” (Mr Lee’s name at birth was Harry Lee Kuan Yew), chairman of the so-called Sinkapor Inks corporation, who chucks his company’s newsletter-writer in the janitor’s cupboard for reporting inconvenient truths, and forces his employees to confess to their part in “a Richard Marxist conspiracy”—a sly reference to Operation Spectrum, in which 16 people were arrested and detained without trial, having been accused of being part of a “Marxist conspiracy” to topple the government.

These events remain controversial: the country’s Media Development Authority in effect banned “To Singapore with Love”, a documentary about nine people exiled for their alleged involvement in a communist conspiracy during the 1960s and 1970s. The National Arts Council (NAC) revoked a grant awarded to “The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye” because, as a NAC director explained, the book “potentially undermines the authority or legitimacy of the Singapore government”. The book does not shy away from controversial periods in the nation’s history.

But Singapore did not stop publication. One wonders if Lee Kuan Yew would have been so lenient. But the Singapore of 2016 is not the Singapore of 1983 or the 1950s. It is a more mature, confident country.

Talk to an older Singaporean, however, and at some point you will hear her wax lyrical about the lost kampongs—the small, intimate villages of Singapore replaced by highways and high-rises. In perhaps the book’s most moving section, Charlie recalls the “old uncle with his cinema-on-wheels”: an old man on a bicycle toting a film projector. Eventually that gave way to theatres and television. The old uncles still came by, Charlie, recalls, “but the kids just didn’t seem to get as excited about his appearance anymore. As the years went by you’d see him less and less often, until one day (out of the blue), you’d look, but would not find him anywhere.” Most people, of course, would rather watch films on their flat-screen TVs than on the side of a courtyard wall. But in the rush to give everyone the means to buy state-of-the-art TVs, it’s worth sparing a thought for the walls.