Popular Culture Review Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2013 | Page 59

The Coming of Age of Chinese Comics 55 was emerging as a new fad at the time, they cooperated with three photographers—Lang Jingshan, Hu Boxu, and Zhang Zhenhou—to enhance the coverage of photographs of news, celebrities, landscapes, and paintings, etc., so to increase the attraction o f the pictorial. From April 21, 1928 to June 7, 1930, when it was eventually merged into the newly published Shidai huabao {Modern Miscellany),7 the joumal released a total 110 issues with a by-then pretty large circulation of about 3,000 copies per issue (Bi and Huang, 1986, p. 86; Ye, 1996, p. 1). Each issue was lithographed on eight pages of octavo paper, four of which were process printing dedicated to manhua. The regulär contributors of manhua included Ye Qianyu, Zhang Guangyu, Zhang Zhengyu, Huang Wennong, and Lu Shaofei. Later they were joined by Cao Hanmei, Lu Zhiyang, Zheng Guanghan, Hu Tongguang, and some young authors trained by the Correspondent Department of the joumal.8 Like many other joumals published in Shanghai at the time, the cover o f each issue bore both its Chinese title Shanghai manhua and English title Shanghai Sketch.9 The choice of “sketch” as its English rendition and its diverse content, which included essays, photographs, portraits, paintings, and fashion designs in addition to Cartoons and comic Strips, seem to suggest a rather broad usage of the term manhua. In some early advertisements of the joum al’s solicitation for contribution, the editors listed under the category of “pictorial work” {huagao), these descriptive words for the pictures being solicited: fengcide (satirical), xinzhuangde (new fashion), huajide (humouristic), tu ’ande (graphic), miaoxie shenghua de (depicting real lifo), fahui yishu de (artistic). Later the grouping was simplified to cover design (fengmian), humoristic {huaji), decorative (:zhuangshi), satirical (fengci) four categories.10 The thematic diversity of what was covered under the umbrella term manhua also suggests that the genre manhua was identified in terms of formal and material characteristics, but its subcategorization still retained the same logic as the categorization of traditional Chinese ink painting (guohua) according to its subject matter (i.e., figu &R