As the 399th talk delivered at the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium, Damian Mandzunowski and Lena Henningsen will introduce Chinese comics and the ChinaComx project on Tuesday, 24 Sept. 2024, at 9 pm Heidelberg time / 3 pm New York time. For more, see here.

To register for the online talk via zoom, please email comicssymposium@gmail.com.

Their talk is titled Beyond Captain America and Akira: Heroes and Villains in Chinese Comics and Caricature, abstract:

Comics are a global medium with local variations and characteristics, emanating from different historical, cultural, social, political, and economic contexts. Putting the many differences aside, many forms of comics often share high popularity, expressive visuals and a focus on positive and negative role models. In this presentation, we therefore propose to look at Chinese comics (lianhuanhua) and caricature (manhua) through the lens of heroes and villains to offer both a general overview of these visual media and a specific examination of one of its core tropes. We will show how the era of high Maoism of the 1960s-1970s was also a heyday of the lianhuanhua genre as it was widely used as a tool for education and propaganda. Contrary to popular belief, also throughout the early Reform Era of the 1980s, lianhuanhua continued to shape prototypes of ideological heroes and villains, rendering all kinds of role models easy to detect. At the same time, however, Chinese comics began to critically re-examine the Maoist years, adapted (officially and bootleg) Hollywood blockbusters, and to, employ a fuller repertoire of expressive and ambivalent visual techniques, including pencil drawing, oil painting, traditional Chinese papercut and watercolors, or woodcut inspired by European modernism, thus undermining the previously clear-cut notions of what makes a hero (or villain) and they would have to look like. And although lianhuanhua as a particular medium-specific type of Chinese comics mostly faded away toward the end of the century, these handy pocket-sized booklets were shared among children and adults alike to be read at street stall libraries or at work units after hours for over seven decades. With an estimated 50.000 unique titles published since 1949 and one-in-three new books published in 1986 being a lianhuanhua, Chinese comics deserve broader recognition and scholarly interest both as distinct genre and area of academic research.