The Coming of Age of Chinese Comics:
Manhua, “Mr. Wang,” and Shanghai Sketch
Introduction
It is commonly acknowledged that the term manhua, the Chinese
rendition of comics and Cartoons, is a loan word borrowed from Japanese
manga in 1925 when Zheng Zhenduo first used it to refer to Feng Zikai’s
Cartoons in Wenxue Zhoubao (Literature Weekly).1 Some art historians
(Lent, 1994: 281; Li, 1978; Bi and Huang, 1986) argue for the predated
practices of manhua in grotesque drawings, serial story pictures, New Year’s
pictures, and wall paintings in pre-modem Chinese art. Sarcasm and humor
can be found as an integrated part in many forms of traditional Chinese arts,
such as the paintings by Zhu Da (1626-1705?) and Luo Liangfeng (17331799). By the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), various terms like
“fengcihua” (satirical picture), “yuyihua” (allegorical picture), “xiehua”
(humorous picture), “xiaohua” (burlesque picture), or “huajihua” (farcical
picture) had been in use, referring to pictures with exaggerated images and
satirical or humorous connotations. However, it is a modern phenomenon
that illustrated humor becomes the defining characteristic of an independent
genre of art. The popularization of manhua in the forms of single-panel
Cartoons, comic Strips, and comic books is only made possible with the
development of the mass printing industry and, as Kuiyi Shen (2001, p. 109)
has pointed out, the emergence of a “quickly rising middle-class of
consumers in Shanghai.”
Ye Qianyu’s (1907-2005) “Wang xiansheng” (Mr. Wang) series is
China’s first and one of the longest running comic Strips with continuing
characters. The creation of the images of petty urbanites2 in Shanghai
showed an observable departure from the strong nationalist and political
concems in earlier Chinese comic works. The appearance of this long comic
strip, first serialized in Shanghai Sketch from 1928 to 1930, marked the
point at which manhua had fully grown into an effective graphic narrative
tool of social humor and matured as an independent genre of C