Nick Stember, Jan. 21, 2025 at 3pm EDT
presents The Fast and The Scurrilous: On comics and cartoons in Shanghai in the 1920s and beyond.
The 410th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025 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 EDT start for this event.
Nick Stember presents The Fast and The Scurrilous: On comics and cartoons in Shanghai in the 1920s and beyond.
In this talk, I will be introducing manhua and lianhuanhua, two distinct but not unrelated approaches to tuhua (drawings) that emerged in Shanghai in the 1920s. Understood most simply, whereas manhua referred to satirical cartoons and short gag strips, lianhuanhua referred to long-form comic books, coming to be known in English as ‘picture stories’ – in other words, graphic novels. If manhua (lit. ‘casual pictures’) rewarded close inspection (however tongue-in-cheek) and encouraged aesthetic appreciation, the ‘paper cinema’ of lianhuanhua was quick and dirty, made for a market of would-be cinema goers eager to catch a glimpse of the next big thing. Whereas whenever possible manhua were printed in full color, in the largest formats available, pulpy, salacious lianhuanhua were printed on paper so cheap it barely held together and bound into books so small you had to squint to read them. But while the ambitions their creators and publishers held for the two mediums may have differed (one high, one low), this talk will show that they shared a great deal in common in terms of both context and content. Taking the example of the pioneering Shanghai Manhua Association and their work, I will be arguing that while much of the way that we think about this group today is shaped by their later careers as propagandists and cultural bureaucrats for the Chinese Communist Party, lianhuanhua in the 1920s in fact represent as much a forgotten influence as a path not taken. And while lianhuanhua artists, too, would find unprecedented opportunities for success and prestige in the first decades of the socialist experiment of the 1950s and 1960s, it was only at the expense of repressing their origins in the pulp presses of the entrepot era – a legacy that would come roaring back to life with the death of Mao in 1976, and the triumphant return of Hollywood to China.
Nick Stember is a historian and translator of Chinese literature and popular culture who recently defended his PhD dissertation on “pulp science” in early Reform-era (1976-1986) comic books in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, titled Low Culture Fever: Pulp Science in Chinese Comic Books After Mao (1976-1981). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, studying visual depictions of Daoist self-cultivation in comics, animations, video games, and other transmedia adaptations of xianxia or ‘immortal fantasy.’
Cover for "Shanghai Night" Shanghai Manhua issue 13 (July 1, 1928), Huaisu 懷素