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Populär Culture Review
As for his dull friend, Xiao Chen, a young master of a rieh family in
Shanghai, he is a weak person trapped in unhappy marriage, but “although
he has yielded to the unfeeling family, his heart is bubbled up with warm
blood pursuing love.” On these two characters, Ye (1930, p. 3) remarked,
“‘fate’ plays its extreme power to stage grotesque comedies. I know that
deep in their heart they feel sorrow and bittemess, but they are generous and
don’t feel weary . . . They will be forevermore trapped to the wheel of fate
and perform lots of comedies!”
The rather sympathetic tone toward the imperfect life of Shanghai
urbanites showed the ambiguity and complexity of the artist’s attitude
toward his creation. As Episode 40 and the Statement pronounce, the
recognizable human traits and human foibles displayed in Mr. Wang are
actually something that everyone could identify with, or at least understand,
to a certain extent. Ye even went as far as claiming that, “Mr. Wang is me; I
am Mr. Wang” (Ye, 1992, p. 29). Because Ye’s ability of characterizing
petty urbanites in graphic narrative, Mr. Wang became “a character type, a
true comic Strip hero, the first and one of the most original of this kind in
China” (Shen, 2001, p. 113).
Conclusion
On the one hand, new technologies and modes of communication
first appeared in Shanghai, the most important treaty port since the last
several decades of the nineteenth Century, and therefore brought in massive
production and craft de-skilling, which partly contributed to the decline of
traditional literati painting and the rise of commercial art and populär
culture. On the other hand, the flourishing of commercial life in Shanghai
stimulated the growth of urban leisure culture, which provides demand,
inspiration, and the market for consumption of new inventions of artistic
expression.
This paper briefly analyzes the institutional dimension and
individual effort in promoting manhua as an established art in Shanghai i