Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn

Taking the humble manhua (cartoon) periodical as his subject, in Manhua Modernity, John Crespi provides a kaleidoscopic account of this much celebrated and much reviled art form, tracing its history from the late nineteenth century to the final decades of the twentieth, “not just in pictorial magazines but as pictorial magazines” (27). Echoing Leo Ou-fan Lee's seminal Shanghai Modern (1999), Crespi argues that, “just as manhua cannot be divorced from the pictorial, the pictorial belongs to the urban experience of modernity” (2). As Crespi demonstrates in his meticulous review of both Chinese- and English-language scholarship on manhua, neither of these propositions is self-evident. Beginning with the pioneering work of Bi Keguan 畢克官 and Huang Yuanlin 黃遠林 in Zhongguo Manhua Shi 中國漫畫史 (A History of Chinese Manhua) (Wenhua Yishu Chubanshe 文化藝術出版社 [Culture and Art Publishing House], 1986), the history of both manhua and its close cousin, lianhuanhua (comic books), have...