The Coming of Age of Chinese Comics
57
Wang Strip was such an instant hit that Shanghai Sketch published the
collections of the comic Strip while the series were still running. Not only
were there were nine volumes of four kinds of collections of the Mr. Wang
serial published in the 1930s,11 but also there were a total of eleven film
comedies adapted ffom the Mr. Wang comic Strips from the 1930s to the
1940s,12 and one in 1993.13 The popularity of the comic figures, as I am
going to elaborate in the rest of my paper, provides an interesting case of
how Chinese artists localize Western visual forms to construct a modern
identity for the metropolitan Shanghai. And the appearance of this long
comic Strip marked the point at which manhua had fully grown into an
effective graphic narrative tool of social humor.
Ye Qianyu and Mr. Wang
The creator of Mr. Wang is the comic editor of the joumal,
Shanghai Sketch, Ye Qianyu. Originally named Ye Lunqi, Ye was bom into
a merchant family in Tonglu, Zhejiang. He never received any formal
training in art, but taught himself painting and drawing by copying from
lithographic models published in Shanghai. He started his career in Shanghai
at age eighteen as a self-taught commercial artist who painted advertising
billboards, stage settings, textbook illustrations, fashion design, etc. These
practices, according to Ye himself, cultivated his ability of modeling
(zaoxing).14 Inspired by the flourishing print culture in Shanghai, he started
drawing Cartoons. His first cartoon work, “Liangmaoqian bao yanfu” (To
Feast Your Eye with Twenty Cents) was published in Sanri huakan (Three
Day Pictorial), which was edited by cartoonist Zhang Guangyu who
encouraged Ye to contribute to the pictorial. Because of this connection, Ye
got to know other active cartoonists at the time, such as Huang Wennong,
Wang Dunqing, and Lu Shaofei. Since then, he started frequently
contributing to newspapers and populär magazines and devoted himself to
the editing of the comic pages of Shanghai Sketch when the joumal was
published.
The creation of Mr. Wang demonstrated both the influence of
American comic Strips and the distinctive quotidian life of petty urbanites in
Shanghai. According to Ye, the idea of launching a comic Strip in Shanghai
Sketch was inspired by an American comic Strip, Bringing Up Father,
serialized in the Sunday Su