The Coming of Age of Chinese Comics
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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