Monthly Archives: April 2015

Imperial Chinese Avengers is a Thing: Four Chinese Superhero Mashups

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The Avengers franchise and superhero films in general are big business in China, with the first film of the series earning Marvel and Disney some 567 million RMB [$91.6 million USD] when it was released in mainland movie theaters in 2012,1 with $17.4 million of that coming in on just the first day.2 Given the popularity of the film in the Middle Kingdom, perhaps it isn’t surprising to see cartoonists both here in North America and over in China attempting to “sinicize” 漢化 the heroes. Here are four examples I’ve come across in the last week.

 

1. Avengers of Imperial China by micQuestion

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Source: http://micquestion.deviantart.com/art/The-Avengers-of-Imperial-China-373438271

Created in January, 2012, for a contest on CBR, micQuestion’s version features The Immortal Captain, Invincible Iron Mandarin, Mighty Thunder, and the Emerald Mountain.

2. Peking Opera Avengers by Gene Luen Yang

Captain-America

Captain America

Iron-Man2

Iron Man

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  1. http://www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2013/01/11/20130111112329420341.html [↩]
  2. http://deadline.com/2012/05/avengers-now-260-5m-overseas-could-reach-585m-worldwide-through-sunday-with-u-s-canada-russia-china-openings-265455/ [↩]

A Comics Industry with Chinese Characteristics: Manhua Publishing in the PRC and Hong Kong

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Recently, I have been working on a few projects to get Chinese comics published in English translation. It’s a tricky proposition, given the limited “brand name recognition” for manhua outside of China, in comparison to the much better known (and therefore more marketable) Japanese manga.

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Cover to issue #43 of Comicfans’ weekly Comic World 漫畫世界, published September 26, 2014

 

The fact that so much contemporary manhua is visually indistinguishable from manga (cf. above) doesn’t help things, either, unless of course one is going after the manga demographic. So in large part my work with publishers so far has been to steer them towards Chinese comic book artists with more unique styles that touch on topics which would appeal to a more general comics reader.
It’s much easier said than done, however, since artists with more unique styles tend to also be iconoclasts in their storytelling as well. In this post I’m going to introduce some of the major players in the Chinese-language comics industry, and also talk a little about the economic side of making comics in mainland China and Hong Kong.1

 

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Untitled comic by Yan Cong 煙囪 and Wen Ling 温凌 , published online April, 2015

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  1. Taiwan is another area that deserves further study, although my preliminary research suggests that the Taiwanese market is more heavily influenced by Japanese comics than either the PRC or Hong Kong. [↩]