The Coming of Age of Chinese Comics
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home—indicated Chinese society undergoing substantial changes. Visually
representing the modern life style through mass media no doubt further
reinforced Shanghai urbanites’ imagination of and identification with
Western modemity.
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Figure 1: The first episode of “Mr. Wang” in Shanghai Sketch 1 (April 21,1928).
The creation of the images of petty urbanites in Shanghai showed an
observable departure from the strong nationalist and political concems in
earlier Chinese comic works. Although Ye Qianyu was also active during
the North Expedition and participated in the Propagandist activities of the
Nationalist army before he took over the position in Shanghai Sketch, he was
one of the first major Chinese cartoonists who concentrated on social or
nonpolitical humor in the manhua genre. And without doubt, he was very
self-conscious about the rules of commercialism in Shanghai. Starting from
the first episode, the Strip claimed to have Copyright protection from being
copied. Ye claimed that he “was not conscious about exposing something or
satirizing something” when he created the two crowns Mr. Wang and Xiao
Chen.18 Limited by the scope of the life experiences of a 21 year old as Ye
was when the series was launched, the whole set of a hundred episodes of
Mr. Wang series in Shanghai Sketch mainly focused on the light humor that
emerged from the domestic conflicts between husbands and wives in their
quotidian life, such as how the pleasure-seeking men struggled for any
chances of escaping their wives’ control to go out for fun, how Xiao Chen
tried to pursue Mr. Wang’s pretty daughter but was always sabotaged by his