page_title: Lat (cartoonist)
section_title: Childhood and education
hierarchical_section_title: Lat (cartoonist) / Childhood and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Cherating Village, Kuantan: taken with an infrared set up
context_page_description: Datuk Mohammad Nor bin Mohammad Khalid, more commonly known as Lat, is a Malaysian cartoonist. Winner of the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2002, Lat has published more than 20 volumes of cartoons since he was 13 years old. His works mostly illustrate Malaysia's social and political scenes, portraying them in a comedic light without bias. Lat's best known work is The Kampung Boy, which is published in several countries across the world. In 1994, the Sultan of Perak bestowed the honorific title of datuk on Lat, in recognition of the cartoonist's work in helping to promote social harmony and understanding through his cartoons. Lat also works for the government to improve trance genre, and to improve the city's social security.
  Born in a village, Lat spent his youth in the countryside before moving to the city at the age of 11. While in school, he supplemented his family's income by contributing cartoon strips to newspapers and magazines. He was 13 years old when he achieved his first published comic book, Tiga Sekawan. After failing to attain the grades that were required to continue education beyond high school, Lat became a newspaper reporter.
context_section_description: Mohammad Nor Khalid was born on 5 March 1951 in a kampung (village) in Gopeng, Perak, Malaysia.  His father was a government clerk with the Malaysian Armed Forces, and his mother a housewife.  Khalid was a stocky boy with a cherubic face, which led his family to nickname him bulat (round).  His friends shortened it to "Lat"; it became the name by which he was more commonly known in his kampung and later in the world.  Lat was the eldest child in his family,  and he often played in the jungles, plantations, and tin mines with his friends.  Their toys were usually improvised from everyday sundries and items of nature.  Lat liked to doodle with materials provided by his parents, and his other forms of recreation were reading comics and watching television; Lat idolised local cartoonist Raja Hamzah, who was popular with his tales of swashbuckling Malay heroes.  Malaysian art critic and historian Redza Piyadasa believes Lat's early years in the kampung ingrained the cartoonist with pride in his kampung roots and a "peculiarly Malay" outlook—"full of [...] gentleness and refinement".
  Lat's formal education began at a local Malay kampung(village) school; these institutions often taught in the vernacular and did not aspire to academic attainment.  The boy changed schools several times; the nature of his father's job moved the family from one military base to another across the country, until they settled back at his birthplace in 1960.  A year later, Lat passed the Special Malay Class Examination, qualifying him to attend an English medium boarding school—National Type Primary School—in the state's capital, Ipoh.  His achievement helped his father make the decision to sell their kampung estate and move the family to the town; society in those days considered education at an English medium school a springboard to a good future.  Lat continued his education at Anderson School, Perak's "premier non-missionary English medium school".  Redza highlights Lat's move to Ipoh for higher schooling as a significant point in the cartoonist's development; the multi-racial environment helped establish his diverse friendships, which in turn broadened his cultural perspectives.
  At the age of nine, Lat began to supplement his family's income through his artistic skills, by drawing comics and selling them to his friends.  Four years later, in 1964, the young cartoonist achieved his first published work: a local movie magazine—Majallah Filem—printed his comic strips, paying him with movie tickets.  Lat's first comic book publication, Tiga Sekawan (Three Friends Catch a Thief), was published by Sinaran Brothers that year.  The company had accepted Lat's submission, mistaking him for an adult and paying him 25 Malaysian ringgits (RM) for a story about three friends who band together to catch thieves.  In 1968, at the age of 17, Lat started penning Keluarga Si Mamat (Mamat's Family), a comic strip for Berita Minggu (the Sunday edition of Berita Harian).  The series ran in the paper every week for 26 years.  Although still a schoolboy, Lat was earning a monthly income of RM100, a large sum in those days, from his cartoons.  His education finished two years later at the end of Form 5; his Third Grade in the Senior Cambridge examinations was not enough for him to advance to Form 6.  Graduating with an education equivalent to that of high school, Lat started looking for a job and had his sights set on becoming an illustrator.
caption: Lat grew up in a kampung, where wooden houses are built on stilts and surrounded by countryside.
exif: {}