Damian Mandzunowski & Lena Henningsen, Sept. 24, 2024 at 3 pm EDT online
Beyond Captain America and Akira: Heroes and Villains in Chinese Comics and Caricature
The 399th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024 at 3 pm EDT. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. Please note 3pm starting time.
Beyond Captain America and Akira: Heroes and Villains in Chinese Comics and Caricature with Damian Mandzunowski & Lena Henningsen, Heidelberg University
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.
Damian Mandzunowski is Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC-funded project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” at the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. He was a curator of the largest digital collection of Chinese caricatures from the late 1970s (https://www.maoistlegacy.de/db/items/?tag=漫画) and published on their production patterns and gendered visuals. He is also preparing a monograph based on his dissertation on politcal study and other collective reading practices in China after 1949. His research focuses on the intersections of politics, visual culture, and everyday life.
Lena Henningsen is PI of the ERC-funded project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” at the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. Before that she was a junior professor at the University of Freiburg conducting another ERC project on reading practices in China (ReadChina). With a background in Chinese Studies, literary and cultural studies, she is interested in the production, circulation and reception of texts both as literary artefacts and as concrete material objects. She has published widely on topics such as unofficial manuscript fiction from the Cultural Revolution (Cultural Revolution Manuscripts) and copyright infringements on the 2000s bestseller market (Copyright Matters), has published a number of translations of Chinese lianhuanhua and is now working on a monograph on the adaptation of Lu Xun into lianhuanhua.