Larry Feign

Larry Feign (born December 5, 1955), an American-born cartoonist and writer, is best known for his comic strip The World of Lily Wong. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, graduating with a B.A. in 1979, and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. His earliest comic-strip character was known as "Hoiman the Mouse", which he created as the mascot for Dum, a mimeographed magazine produced a few times per year with several collaborators in primary school. Later he co-created "Billy Wizard", which began as a collaboration in high school with Jon Tschirgi, but he continued it alone throughout college. Billy Wizard was also the mascot of a bootleg vinyl record label, "Wizardo Rekords". He and Tschirgi also formed a rock band which released one LP record in 1976 under the name The B. Toff Band, and a 45 rpm single in 1978 under the name Billy Wizard.

Feign started cartooning professionally in 1980 in Honolulu, where he worked as a caricature artist in the International Marketplace. In 1983, he moved to Los Angeles and worked for the animation studio DIC Productions as a storyboard artist for the "Heathcliff the Cat" animated television series. In 1985, he moved to Hong Kong, where he created a feature called "Aieeyaaa!", a satirical Chinese-word-a-day single-panel cartoon, which ran daily in the Hongkong Standard for one year. He terminated the feature when he started producing The World of Lily Wong for the same newspaper.

The World of Lily Wong appeared in The Standard from November 1986 to December 1987; the South China Morning Post between January 1987 and May 1995; The Independent (UK) between March 1997 and June 1997 (to chronicle the final hundred days of British rule in Hong Kong); and the HK iMail from May 2000 until September 2001. In July 1997, Lily Wong appeared in a special Hong Kong handover edition of Time magazine, the first full-page cartoon editorial in the magazine's history. Lily Wong also appeared in syndication in Malaysia's New Straits Times from 1991 to 1998, and individually in numerous periodicals and books around the world.

The abrupt cancellation of Lily Wong by the South China Morning Post in May 1995, following a series of cartoons deemed offensive to the Beijing leadership, garnered international attention, as the most high-profile case to date of media self-censorship in final years preceding Hong Kong's handover to the People's Republic of China.

From 1998-2000 Feign lived in London, where he produced a comic strip known as The Royals, which satirized the antics of the British Royal Family, and a weekly political comic strip for Time magazine's international editions. Feign's cartoons have appeared in many publications around the world and received several international awards.

Feign's cartoons and other writings have been compiled into 15 books. He has also produced animation for Walt Disney Television, Cartoon Network and others, and writes for various magazines in Hong Kong, where he still lives. His latest book, a collection of humorous essays entitled Hongkongitis, was published in 2007. In 2011 he received a literature fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.