As many of you already know, I am on track to graduate from the Department of Asian Studies at UBC with my Masters degree in August. After a lot hand wringing, I’ve decided to take a year off from graduate school to devote myself to translation and other projects. I’m not sure if I will […]
In my post on cartoon versions of Sun Wukong, I discussed Zhang Guangyu’s 張光宇 (1900-1965) overlooked masterpiece, Manhua Journey to the West 西遊漫記. Originally created in the fall of 1945 while Zhang was living in the wartime capital of Chongqing, Manhua Journey to the West was initially introduced to the public through a series of popular exhibitions […]
Few figures in Chinese mythology seem better suited to being adapted to cartoons than the Monkey King, Sun Wukong 孙悟空: Source: James Khoo Fuk-lung’s (邱福龍) The Sage King，Issue 1, 2002. Certainly, Nezha 哪吒 has found some success through his own films and cartoons, such as the classic 1979 Cultural Revolution parable, Nezha Conquers the Dragon King […]
These are my preliminary reading notes for 39th and final issue of Modern Sketch 時代漫畫, published July 20, 1937 二十六年七月二十日, edited/published 編輯/發行 by Lu Shaofei 魯少飛 and distributed 縂經售 by Shanghai Modern Publication Ltd 上海時代圖書公司， at this time both located at 240 Avenue Joffre 霞飛路1, telephone number 80781. The cost for a single issue […]
Between World War I and World War II China experienced it’s first boom in the production and appreciation of cartoons and manhua. Although several notable cartoon and proto-cartoon publications predate World War I (and more importantly in China, the collapse of the Qing in 1911),1 it is the 1920s and 1930s which saw comic strips […]
The Tiananmen Square Massacre is an incredibly difficult topic to discuss without getting smeared with the brush of anti-CCP demagogue or, alternately, pro-CCP apologist.1 The modern Chinese historian Jeff Wasserstrom has argued that the term “Tiananmen Square Massacre” itself is something of a misnomer, given that most sources seems to agree that most (if not […]
Seeing that Eric Abrahamsen’s translation of Xu Zechen’s Running Through Beijing was released by Two Lines Press earlier this month, it seems appropriate to sketch out a tradition of movie pirating that existed in mainland China before the advent of bootlegged DVDs: This is a lianhuanhua 連環畫 adaptation of Star Wars which historian Maggie Greene picked […]