SINGAPORE — For half a century, Singapore’s creation story has been one of tough love.

It goes something like this: Newly independent from its bigger neighbor Malaysia, small and vulnerable in the middle of the Cold War, beset by Communist infiltrators and surrounded by domino nations, Singapore finally found stability and a road to prosperity when its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, defeated dangerous left-wing opponents, regrettably by having many tossed in jail.

This young nation’s narrative has been hammered home in textbooks, the mass media and television shows. To oppose it meant risking detention without trial, costly libel suits or extreme marginalization in a country where the state controls most purse strings and levers of power.

But this monolithic view of the past has begun to change, thanks in part to a soft-spoken artist and his comic book cast of robots, aliens and cockroaches.

“The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye” tells the story of Singapore’s greatest cartoonist, who grew up after the war when the colonies of British Malaya and Singapore were agitating for independence. Charlie Chan documents that era of riots and protests in a series of vignettes, each one paying homage to some of the world’s comic book artists — and along the way challenging myths and rescuing from anonymity people written out of the official version.