Tag Archives: wuxia

The Man from River South Spoiler Free Character Map

Posted on by

As part of a translation project I’m working on, I took it upon myself to draw up a character map for Hai Yan’s 海宴 epic wuxia novel The Man From River South 琅琊榜  (aka Nirvana in Fire aka Langyabang). I’ve deleted (most) of the spoilers, leaving in the information which will help people watching the tv show on Viki follow along (click to see the full size version):

LANGYABANG-Spoiler-Free-Character-Map

Keep an eye out, I should have more news on this project soon!1

  1. Also, my much anticipated MA thesis defense has finally been scheduled for later this month (woohoo!) and a 70+ page book of translated comics samples for Books from Taiwan is at the printer and will soon be online as well! I haven’t had much time for this site recently, but hopefully that will change soon… [↩]

Imperial Chinese Avengers is a Thing: Four Chinese Superhero Mashups

Posted on by

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

the_avengers_of_imperial_china_by_micquestion-d66c2tb

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

Continue reading →

  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/ [↩]

Only Ten Percent of Ma Wing-shing’s Epic Chinese Manhua _Chinese Hero_ Has Been Translated Into English

Posted on by

I recently found out that one of the first and only manhua to be translated into English and published in North America was edited to remove anti-Caucasian racism. In the first issue of the original version of Chinese Hero 中 華英雄, created by Ma Wing-shing (馬榮成) which was published in the early 1980s in  《金報》 [Golden Daily?] , the protagonist’s parents are killed by ‘foreign devils‘ 洋鬼子:

chinese hero 2

chinese hero 1

According to the publisher of the 2006 English translation, DrMaster, however “[a]s a child, Hero’s1 family was attacked and killed by a practitioner of Northern Mantis kung fu.”2 Rather than going back and re-drawing the comic, though, DrMaster skipped the first [undetermined number of issues of] Chinese Hero comics and jumped ahead to the birth of Hero’s son. The publisher also had the art re-colored and re-touched.

The murder of Hero’s parents by foreign devils is not the only plot point that Anglophone readers of Chinese Hero are missing out on. The original series ran for 159 issues with Ma Wing-shing at the helm before being passed on to Cheung Ma Yau (張萬有) in 1989, with each issue averaging around 130 pages. The eight translated volumes published by DrMaster average around 270 pages, meaning they each contain two issues of the original run. This means only  about 10% of Ma’s Chinese Hero have been translated into English.3

Continue reading →

  1. The protagonist of Chinese Hero is named Hua Yingxiong [Wah Ying-hung] (华英雄), literally ‘Chinese Hero’. [↩]
  2. DGN Production/DrMaster Publications： Chinese Hero: Tales of the Blood Sword vol 1 [↩]
  3. And that’s not even counting the more than 250 issues that were done by Cheung and other artists though the 90s and 00s! [↩]