After a bit over a year since the ChinaComx project commenced, and just over half a year after the team was assembled and our daily work on all things lianhuanhua began, we welcomed to Heidelberg 18 scholars of Chinese (and Asian) cartoon, caricature, comics, lianhuanhua, and other related forms of pictorial narratives for an intensively productive albeit fun workshop on 24-26 April 2025.

One of the presenters and close friend of the project, Nick Stember, himself a translator and historian of Chinese literature and popular culture who has been writing extensively on the topic of Chinese comics and visual print and screen cultures more broadly for over a decade now, contributed a post-workshop summary. We thank Nick for his initiative and provide the summary here in full length, as, while written from the point of view of one of the participants and voicing some personal reflections from the author, it gives back adequately the scope and variety of presentations and conversations heard during the ChinaComx “Lianhuanhua as Method” workshop.

If we were to select the one key observation of the workshop it perhaps would be that to position a distinct medium as the defining element of inquiry indeed does not imply a limitation or constraint; much to the contrary, and as we believe is also tangible from the following conference report, by putting lianhuanhua centerstage we open up a whole new horizon of possibilities to reading Chinese culture, politics, society, literature, and history.

And now on to Nick Stember’s summary of the workshop——and if you would like to continue the discussion, please do reach out to us using the website’s contact form!

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Lianhuanhua as Method: A ChinaComx Workshop, 24-26 April 20025, Heidelberg

conference report by Nick Stember*

Having spent a very productive three days getting to geek out over lianhuanhua (and Chinese comics more broadly) at the ChinaComx “Lianhuanhua as Method” workshop, I wanted to take a moment to provide a quick summary of the papers that were presented and touch on some of the recurring topics and themes. This seems particularly appropriate given that, as a relatively small and still emerging field, there is still a great deal of work to be done to define the parameters of our research—which, as it happens was one of the goals of the workshop, which included papers on topics related to lianhuanhua such as (to give just two examples) manhua and cigarette cards. It is my hope also, that by sharing resources, strategies, and findings with our colleagues around the world who are making their own contributions to the study of this distinct area of cultural production, we can play a small part in ‘paying forward’ the generosity of early pioneers in the field, chief among them Kuiyi Shen, Julia Andrews, John Crespi, Ellen Johnston Laing, John Lent, Xu Ying, and Paul Bevan.

It was especially appropriate, therefore, that the workshop opened with a keynote from just such a generous pioneer, with Barbara Mittler presenting a paper titled ‘Chained Pictures and Chained by Pictures,’ subtitled ‘Comics and Cultural Revolutions in China.’ As the talk began, in nod to the organizers, Mittler corrected the latter to read ‘Lianhuanhua and Cultural Revolutions in China,’ bringing to the fore one of the questions of definitions and terminology, which would become one of the recurring themes of the workshop. Building on Walter Benjamin’s provocative claim that “only dialectical images are genuinely historical,” Mittler drew on the example of Zhao Hongben’s celebrated lianhuanhua adaptation of ‘Sun Wukong Thrice Defeats the White Bone Demon’ to show how the changes which were made to editions published before and after the Cultural Revolution reflect the aesthetic hegemony of the ‘Three Represents’ as part of the evolving ideology of Maoist orthodoxy.

This provocative presentation set the stage for the first panel the following day, beginning with my paper, titled ‘Picture Stories: Delimiting the Generic Boundaries of Taste in Lianhuanhua in the 1950s PRC.’ In it, I drew on an editorial published in the inaugural issue of Picture Stories (Lianhuanhua bao) to highlight some of the tensions over poor taste and violent, pornographic, and superstitious subject matter that carried over from the Republican era, and which would remain at the heart of the medium all the way up into the 1980s, a period which (as it happens) was the subject of my PhD thesis. This historical contextualization of lianhuanhua was paired with Lena Henningsen’s theoretically nuanced discussion of ‘Approaching Lianhuanhua as Genre,’ in which she suggested that lianhuanhua can be understood as not just a medium, but further as genre (or grouping of genres), both contained within the larger super-category of comics (as we understand them today), and at the same time distinct from it.

In the question and answer session, meanwhile, Stephen Packard as discussant pointed to the question of affordances and limitations, inviting us to consider, “What questions does [treating lianhuanhua as a medium or genre] allow us to ask?”

It was this question that Avital Avina took up in the presentation of her paper, titled ‘Cigarette Cards Telling Stories: Tradeable Lianhuanhua?’ Taking a closer look at an even more neglected area of cultural production, Avina considered the humble cigarette card, which, as she demonstrated, served as much more than just an eye-catching collectible and marketing tool. Rather, Avina argued that the cigarette card encouraged a specific habitus of engagement in graphic narrative that was strikingly similar to the consumption and production of lianhuanhua — highlighting the same mix of high culture and low humor that characterize the comics of the pre- and post-Mao eras. Following on from this, Damian Mandzunowski turned to the weird and wild world of instruction manual lianhuanhua, presenting a series of comics dedicated to the purchasing and maintenance of desirable home appliances, from television sets to refrigerators to bicycles. Observing that these products would have been out of reach for all but the most privileged and well-off of consumers, Mandzunowski made a provocative case for a parallel with the presentation of utopian plentitude that characterized the Great Leap Forward over twenty years earlier, and suggested that these texts can be read as‘manuals of instruction’ in the new cosmopolitanism and capitalist consumerism of the postsocialist period.

In his discussion of this panel, chair Harlan Chambers touched on the production of leisure as a central concern of not only the two papers, but the topic of lianhuanhua as a whole, while at the same time cautioning us to not confuse historical repetition with historical continuity. In this regard, he pointed to the re-enclosure of women in the home as a place of abundance as a reversion, rather than a continuation of the radical Maoist politics of emancipation.

In the afternoon, the discussion of continuity and discontinuity continued with Martina Caschera’s paper ‘Transmedial Storytelling: Mu Ming’s 假⼿于⼈ Becoming an Italian Graphic Novel’ in which she introduced a recent adaption of a short story by the Chinese science fiction author Mu Ming into a graphic novel by the Italian writer Erica Benvenuti and illustrator Cristina Tomasini, as part of the Future Editions series edited by Francesco Verso. Caschera argued that this work represents an excellent example of the productive collaborations that can develop when graphic storytellers working in one tradition are invited to collaborate with Chinese authors to visually represent speculative futures. Similarly, in her paper ‘Translating Lianhuanhua: Reflections on The Later Journey to the West for Translation Practices in Course,’ Yun-jou Chen shared her experience working with a group of German- and Chinese-speaking students to translate a lianhuanhua adaption of Later Journey to the West from the late 1980s. Chen suggested what made this class particularly effective as a learning exercise was the process of negotiation and advising that took place between students with differing linguistic and cultural backgrounds, resulting in two distinct translations.

As discussant, Lena Henningsen noted the unexpected challenges and opportunities that cross-cultural communication provides, particularly in regard to the interpretation of visual motifs and differing approaches to translation, as demonstrated in these two papers. She further shared that ChinaComx has several translations of lianhuanhua forthcoming on its website and encouraged Chen and her students (and indeed participants in the workshop as well) to submit their work for inclusion in this project.

Mariia Guleva kicked off the next panel with her paper ‘When Cartoons Look Like Comics: Interpreting Standalone Manhua in Multi-panel Layouts,’ sharing examples of not only multi-panel manhua (cartoons) – in other words, comics strips – but also full-page spreads on related topics, designed to help readers make sense of otherwise ambiguous content. Drawing on Scott McCloud’s concept of closure, Neil Cohn’s ‘filling in the gaps,’ and Ernst Gombrich’s ‘projection into,’ Guleva observed that such juxtapositions often run the risk of confusing eulogies and criticism, providing examples of letters from readers complaining of just this. In the next paper, ‘Actions and Intentions: A Distant Reading of Lianhuanhua,’ Aijia Zhang took a different tack, providing a statistical analysis of an initial corpus of over 200 lianhuanhua using machine learning applied to the captions and other paratexts. In her preliminary findings, Zhang noted the prevalence of stories set in the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937–1945), highlighting the importance of patriotism and national sovereignty in these stories.

As discussant, Jaqueline Berndt urged us to reconsider the usefulness of ambiguity for political messaging and also encouraged the pairing of quantitative and qualitative analysis, observing that digital tools can obscure as much as they reveal.

For the second keynote, Stephan Packard presented his paper titled ‘Who Are These Panels For? Comparative Perspectives on Popular Sequential Art,’ providing a whirlwind tour of the contributions of media studies to the emerging field of comics studies over the past two decades. Beginning with the question ‘What does it mean to say that lianhuanhua are an object for comics studies?’ Packard introduced Dick Higgins’ concept of ‘intermedia,’ or the space that is opened up in works that bridge distinct media and genres. Provisionally then, Packard suggested that ‘popular sequential art’ could be used to refer to a loose network of associated terms and creative practices, from comics and lianhuanhua to manhua and cartoons. This multimodal approach to the medium allowed Packard to discuss potential parallels between two distinct (but not necessarily divergent) traditions of popular sequential art. Framing his analysis in two-parts, Packard discussed first the aesthetic and semiotic characteristics of comics, highlighting the formal characteristics that have been used in attempts at definition: among them, cartoonization and caricature, sequence and anatomy of the page, and the juxtaposition of script and image. In the second part, meanwhile, Packard turned to the question of popularity and comics as a tool for mass communication — a topic with particular relevance in the Chinese context of revolutionary socialism — before concluding with a discussion of the division of labor in comics-making, and the persistent association of popular sequential art with Rancière’s ‘representative regime’ in contrast with the ‘aesthetic regime’ of high art.

In the lively discussion that followed, participants raised a number of points with Packard, but perhaps most of all acknowledging that lianhuanhua, while sharing many points of similarity with comics as they are understood in the field of comics studies (being primarily composed of American and European comics strips and comic books, with a small carve out for Japanese manga) also remain distinct from this area of cultural production. A key example was the case of the so-called ‘Comics Code’, implemented in the 1950s to head off the threat of censorship from Congress. While lianhuanhua experienced a similar moral panic in the early 1950s following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Civil War (1945–49), the extent to which the government was able to dramatically intervene in the production and consumption of lianhuanhua during this period far exceeded that of their contemporaries in the US. Such examples demonstrate just one of the many areas where not only historically informed but also critically engaged analysis like Packard’s can help contextualize lianhuanhua within the larger field of comics studies.

Appropriately, then, on the second day of the workshop, Astrid Y. Xiao got things started with her paper ‘Depoliticization, or Not: Role Model, Propaganda, and Lei Feng Comics,’ a close reading of lianhuanhua depicting the model soldier Lei Feng, drawing on examples from the 1960s and up to the present. Xiao argued that while it may be tempting to see such texts as becoming increasingly depoliticized, in fact a closer analysis reveals that, while not being afforded the same cultural significance as before, lianhuanhua featuring Lei Feng remain a potent site of not only political indoctrination, but also moral instruction. Turning to the 1980s, meanwhile, Norbert Danysz presented his paper ‘Appropriations of Sergio Toppi and Stylistic Construction in 1980s Chinese Comics,’ highlighting the curious popularity of an Italian comics artist in China at this time. Providing numerous examples of ‘visual quotes’ from Toppi’s work in lianhuanhua at this time, Danysz argued that not only does the practice resemble the long-standing tradition of ‘swiping’ in comics, but further that elements of Toppi’s style (in particular the copious use of white space in his compositions) can be seen to be prefigured in the work of artists such as Fan Shengfu and Hua Shanchuan from the 1960s.

In her discussion of the two papers, Petra Thiel raised the question of models (Toppi on the one hand, Lei Feng on the other) and underlined the importance of taking into account historical specifics, noting parallels between depictions of childhood and national development that tie together the themes explored by the respective presenters.

In the final panel for the workshop, Jiu Song presented her paper ‘Yesterday Once More: Reconnections of Lianhuanhua Memory Among Readers in the PRC,’ in which she discussed the initial results of her fieldwork in China, where she has been interviewing readers and fans of the medium, accessing relevant archives, and consulting oral histories produced by publishers. She highlighted the central challenge of this comparative work as finding agreement between individual memory and official narratives and balancing official accounts with grassroots ones. Last but not least, Andreas Seifert provided a lively account of his early research into, and collecting of lianhuanhua, beginning with his first encounters with the medium in the 1990s, and culminating in his PhD dissertation, published in 2008 as the monograph Bildgeschichten für Chinas Massen: Comic und Comicproduktion im 20. Jahrhundert.

In her discussion of these two presentations, in addition to noting the symmetry between the two papers (one on readers more broadly, and one from a very particular reader), Emily Graf drew our attention to the fact that although Seifert has since left academia, this early work provides a solid foundation for the field, not least because his collection of over 3,000 lianhuanhua can now be found in the collection of the CATS Library at Heidelberg University, with digital scans being available to researchers around the world.

The conference organizers accordingly invited participants to consult a selection of titles from exactly that collection, extending the theoretical discussions of the previous two days to a practical exercise in close reading. This provided a capstone to a workshop that touched on a range of topics and themes, all centered around the topic of lianhuanhua and Chinese comics more broadly. As Mandzunowski and Henningsen noted, the call for ‘lianhuanhua as method’ was meant in part as an academic provocation — a stimulus to challenge us to think more seriously about the ways that these texts can be used not just as illustrations of historical developments and political campaigns, but as objects of study in their own right. As the rich array of papers presented suggests, lianhuanhua represent an important and largely underappreciated area of cultural production, demonstrating both the continuity and discontinuity of China’s ‘long 20th century,’ and the challenges presented to researchers attempting to bring this body of texts into conversation with popular sequential art from other distinct cultural traditions.

While there is a lot more that can be said, I will end my summary here, to simply thank the organizers for a wonderful and stimulating workshop, inaugurating the exciting new ChinaComx project at the Centre for Asian and Transculutural Studies, Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University.

*Nick Stember is a media historian and translator of Chinese literature and popular culture. His work focuses on the remediation of the past through historical fiction and graphic narrative, considering the combined impacts of public policy and technology on the material conditions for the production and consumption of art and commercial entertainment. See more of his work at www.nickstember.com

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