The Cambodia Daily, Weekend Supplement, Page 14
By Devon Geary and Kaing Menghun
Every morning, customers flock to Phnom Penh’s Rik Reay Restaurant on Street 178 to order the eatery’s specialty, rice noodles, for breakfast. But what food-for-thought they’ll discover after choosing their seat is entirely up to fate.
On the wall next to each table is a different comic, placed there by Phnom Penh based NGO Our Books.
Earlier this year, Leap Sothy, whose family has owned the noodle shop for more than a decade, was approached by Our Books’ managing editor and artist John Weeks, one of the café’s regular customers….
While spending time at Rik Reay, Mr. Weeks had noticed the range of personalities frequenting the street’s many canvas-filled art shops and filtering in and out of the noodle restaurant.
“We have policemen, we have journalists, we have ordinary folks – on Sunday morning, this place is jammed,” he said. “We wanted to get comics into the context of people’s daily lives.”
Mr. Sothy – a 27-year-old architecture student at the nearby Royal University of Fine Arts – discussed the proposition with his parents, and the family agreed. Now, every two to three weeks, the batch of 10 comics is replaced with new drawings, a swap Mr. Sothy says he eagerly awaits…