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E-book Manhua Modernity : Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn
Thinking back, it seems fitting that my relationship with manhua, usually called cartoons or comics in English, started with a magazine, because this book is about both. Why both? Cartoons are cartoons, and magazines are magazines; what is to be gained by combining the two? My reply is that many hours spent marveling at, puzzling over, and gradually deciphering these polymorphic pictures has convinced me that the two are inseparable. Manhua emerged and flourished in dynamic relation to the popular pictorial magazines, or huabao, that hosted them. They were part of the era’s print media ecology, just as today’s Internet memes are creatures of digital social media. In that sense, understanding manhua apart from magazines would be like analyzing an artifact apart from the archaeological matrix in which it was found. It can be done, but much is lost.Beyond manhua and magazines, there is a third term. Just as manhua cannot be divorced from the pictorial, the pictorial belongs to the urban experience of modernity. Manhua, magazines, and modernity. These are the three key con-cepts I explore in the closest historical detail I can muster. Manhua’s peak years of invention and innovation centered in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, a time when Shanghai’s burgeoning market for print entertainment climaxed and this cosmo-politan but troubled metropolis reached the height of notoriety as the “Paris of the East.” The city during this period spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of pictorial magazines, publications that were integral to the imagination of the city as an icon of the modern. The magazines themselves have proven to be rich sources of histor-ical information. Yet the connections between and among the art of manhua, the publications they appeared in, and the city that spawned both have received little more than passing attention. This neglect has skewed, and even impoverished, our understanding of China’s contribution to the global phenomenon of cartoon art. To my mind, this misrecognition is, in part, a problem of definition. The issue is not, however, one of defining manhua more rigorously. On the contrary, it calls for making the word less defined and thereby opening manhua up to larger histori-cal phenomena of modernity, especially as mediated by and through the pictorial magazine. This book is an attempt to breach the conceptual walls dividing man-hua, magazines, and the modern city.
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