Crespi John Beyond Satire Zhang Guangyu Xiyoumanji-With-Cover-Page-V2

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Beyond Satire: The Pictorial

Imagination of Zhang Guangyu's 1945
Journey to the West in Cartoons
John A Crespi
Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner ed., Oxford Handbook on Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016, 215-244.
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Beyond Satire: The Pictorial Imagination of Zhang Guangyu’s 1945 Journey to the West in
Cartoons
Oxford Handbooks Online

Beyond Satire: The Pictorial Imagination of Zhang
Guangyu’s 1945 Journey to the West in Cartoons
John A. Crespi
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures
Edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner
Print Publication Date: Oct 2016

Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Sep 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199383313.013.11
Abstract and Keywords
Zhang Guangyu’s illustrated tale Journey to the West in Cartoons (1945) has been
described as a colorful, whimsical, but also trenchant lampoon of bankrupt politics and
society under Nationalist rule at the close of the War of Resistance against Japan. Journey
is indeed a masterful example of satire, but it is also a remarkable work of manhua, a
genre of verbal-visual art often referred to as “cartoon” that flourished in China’s treaty
ports in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter proposes that when viewed in
conversation with the history of China’s manhua, Zhang’s fanciful allegory describes a
symbiosis between manhua and the popular print genre of the pictorial magazine, the
medium in which manhua thrived during the interwar years.
Keywords: cartoon, satire, China, Journey to the West, Zhang Guangyu
WHEN in November 1945 Chongqing newspapers announced Zhang Guangyu’s 張光宇

(1900–1965) exhibition Journey to the West in Cartoons (西遊漫記), those in the know had
a good idea what to expect. Everyone, from peasant to professor, was of course familiar
with the classic novel Journey to the West (西遊記), which was written in the Ming dynasty
and has permeated the folk religion and popular culture of China ever since. But now that
famous title was interrupted by another word: man (漫). This variation introduced a
separate history, a much shorter one, measured in decades, not centuries, and sent an
unmistakable message: that Zhang would present not a straight retelling of the classic
story, but a fractured fairy tale cast in a particular genre—that of the modern image-text
of manhua (漫畫) or “cartoon.”
Existing studies describe Journey to the West in Cartoons as a colorful, whimsical, but
also trenchant lampoon of politics and society, what Edward Gunn has called a
representation of “Nationalist China in a state of complete moral and social bankruptcy.”1
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Cartoons
Journey is indeed a masterful example of Republican-era political satire, but it is also a

remarkable work of manhua, a genre of verbal-visual art that flourished in China’s
cosmopolitan treaty ports during the first several decades of the twentieth century. In
this chapter, I propose that when viewed in conversation with the history of Chinese
manhua, Journey to the West in Cartoons comes into renewed focus at a level beyond
satire. It is, I argue, also an allegorical look back at the relationship of manhua with the
popular print genre of the pictorial magazine, the medium in which manhua thrived
during the interwar years.
I construct this alternative reading of Journey through several mutually supportive

angles. First, after describing the creation and exhibition of Journey, I review the career
of Zhang Guangyu as a Republican-era artist-entrepreneur who actively developed the
relationship between manhua, which he pioneered, and pictorial magazines, which he
(p. 216) prolifically founded and edited. Examining Zhang’s early work in publishing and
manhua up to 1945 suggests two things. First, his creative identity and professional
network grew out of pictorial magazines; and second, Zhang’s bringing of manhua into
popular pictorials redefined the meaning of manhua by linking this visual genre to the
print genre of the pictorial magazine. I then turn to Journey to the West in Cartoons itself,
reading it not for its satirical messages, which are already well understood, but for how
Zhang in the opening chapter frames Journey as a metacommentary on the pictorial
press, and in particular the manhua pictorial to which he had devoted much of his career.
I conclude with some thoughts on the place of pictorial magazines in the modern Chinese
literary canon.
Journey to the West in Cartoons as Political

Satire
Zhang Guangyu created Journey to the West in Cartoons over a period of about four
months during the second half of 1945. At the time, he was settled temporarily with his
wife and four children, aged seven to eighteen, in Beiwenquan, a quiet mountain village
on the outskirts of Chongqing, China’s wartime provisional capital. Writing in 1946,
Zhang remarks that the idea of illustrating and adapting the Ming dynasty novel Journey
to the West came to him fortuitously. Having exhausted his stock of bedtime stories, he
purchased a copy of the original Journey in the nearby town of Beibei, a local cultural
center and the wartime site of Fudan University. He would read one chapter of the novel
during the day, and then retell it to his children in the evening. This ritual revealed, as he
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puts it, a level of meaning in the legendary tale he had never noticed before: that of anti-
bureaucratic satire. Specifically, Zhang notes that the Jade Emperor’s ruse of granting
the Monkey King Sun Wukong the bogus title of Superintendent of Stables
means that the Jade Emperor’s Heavenly Palace was riddled with bribery and
corruption … such that Sun Wukong’s raising havoc in heaven was a deed of
heroic proportions. Likewise, the novel hints at how all the demons and monsters
that Tripitaka encounters are, without exception, either relatives of the Jade
Emperor or sons-in-law of the Dragon King, sent down to earth as punishment for
misdeeds in Heaven.2
Zhang’s reinterpretation of Journey to the West as satire resonated with a broad trend in
the arts and literature of the Nationalist-controlled regions during the later war years,
what has been called “a loosely coordinated shift from resistance literature back to social
criticism.”3 In other words, after several years of wartime alignment with the state’s goal
of national defense, creators of fiction, drama, poetry, and visual art went back to an
independent, critical stance directed against the misrule of the (p. 217) state authorities,
in this case the regime of Chiang Kai-shek. The return to critique was not lost among
cartoonists, who had specialized in political satire from the 1920s through the 1930s. For
veteran cartoonists, like Ding Cong 丁聰, Ye Qianyu 葉淺予, Liao Bingxiong 廖冰兄, Huang
Yao 黃堯, and of course Zhang Guangyu, it was a time of exhibitions, both joint and
individual, staged in cities like Chongqing, Chengdu, Guiyang, and Kunming. Exhibiting
their work, rather than publishing in magazines or books, was driven by circumstance.
With severe materials shortages, lack of printing facilities, and strict censorship by the
Nationalist authorities making publication in print next to impossible, cartoon artists of
the time turned to public exhibition as the most effective way to reach their audiences.4
The adaptation of traditional materials in Zhang’s Journey was not unique either. The
early years of the War of Resistance had seen extensive experimentation with popular
forms, or “putting new wine in old bottles,” as a way to spread wartime propaganda
among the general populace.5 Although this trend declined in the Nationalist-controlled
areas later in the war as the intended audiences for literature and art moved away from
the illiterate or semiliterate and back toward the educated population, manhua artists did
not discard traditional forms and techniques, but employed them in ways that enhanced
and refined their own distinct styles. For instance, Ding Cong combined social caricature
with the scroll-painting format, complete with colophons, to create his eight-foot-long
Images of Today (現象圖), exhibited in 1944, while Liao Bingxiong’s Spring and Autumn in
the Cat Kingdom (貓國春秋) was influenced by Chinese folk art.6 Huang Yao, meanwhile,
adapted the traditional “ink and wash” (水墨) technique on rice paper to create the sixty-
four panels of his gently tinted but satirically sharp Contradiction Collection (矛盾集).7
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Cartoons
As originally exhibited, Zhang’s Journey comprised sixty panels, with color illustrations
mounted above the accompanying narrative text, which was handwritten by Zhang
Guangyu’s younger brother Zhang Zhengyu 張正宇 in decorative li (隸) style calligraphy
(Fig. 1). The first exhibition of Journey took place from November 22 to mid-December
1945 in Chongqing’s Sino-Soviet Cultural Center, with another showing in Chengdu two
months later. Exhibitions planned for Shanghai and Nanjing in 1946 were banned by the
authorities, but the series was successfully displayed once more in Hong Kong in June
1947.8
The poster Zhang designed

for the exhibition labels
the work a “color, long-
form mythical manhua” (長
篇神話彩色漫畫).9 In the
press, however, Journey
was in at least one
instance advertised under
a slightly different name,
as a “color, long-form
Click to view larger
mythical picture-story” (長
Figure 1 Zhang Zhengyu (left) and Zhang Guangyu
篇神話彩色連環畫).10 The
preparing for the 1945 Chongqing exhibition of
Journey to the West in Cartoons. term picture-story
(Courtesy of Huang Dagang and Tang Wei.) (lianhuanhua 連環畫) refers
to a popular genre of
illustrated storybooks that by the 1930s was being used to present everything from
traditional moral tales to martial arts movies.11 Journey’s structural affinity to the
picture-story genre distinguishes it from the exhibited work of Ding, Ye, Liao, and Huang,
which did not depend on extended narrative format. At the same time, the story’s ten
sections or hui 回, each six panels long, are linked quite loosely, similar to the episodic
structure of Journey to the West the novel.12 Adding further to the open-endedness of
Zhang’s narrative is that the ten hui comprise the (p. 218) first part of what he originally
intended to be a multipart work, so the story itself ends inconclusively.13 Further
resonances with the Ming novel are the introductory couplets introducing each hui, as
well as the overall linguistic style, which emulates the idiom of a traditional vernacular
novel.
As in the original novel, the various subplots in the 1945 Journey come together around a
quest: Sun Wukong (Monkey), Zhu Bajie (Pig), Sha Heshang (Monk Sha), and Tripitaka
(Tang Xuanzang) are traveling in search of the Book of Heaven (天書), a boon whose
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Cartoons
precise meaning and value is left to the reader’s imagination. The four pilgrims move
through five locales, with characters and events in each place alluding to issues of
corruption and misrule in wartime and postwar society. Moolaland (紙幣國), for instance,
is the Orientalist confection of a country where paper money grows on government-
owned trees and Pig, who spits up gold ingots on request, is wined and dined by
caricatured versions of then-Minister of Finance H. H. Kung 孔祥熙, his wife Song Ailing 宋
愛玲, and her brother, the high-ranking politician T. V. Soong 宋子文. In the Kingdom of
Ancient Aegysine (埃秦古國), vicious humanoid crows—most in Egyptian garb, but one
drawn in Disneyesque style as a cigar-smoking hooligan—represent minions of the
Nationalist police state who delight in arresting and enslaving the populace. The city of
Dream Hedonia (“夢得快樂”城), meanwhile, is a futuristic, aerial pleasure zone of beauty
salons, funhouse mirrors, and dance halls restricted to (p. 219) the rich and politically
connected—a dig at the exclusive and Americanized lifestyles of Chongqing’s refugee
elite. From Hedonia the travelers ride steel-clad zeppelins over the “Qin Puppet” Demon
Empire (“偽秦” 妖國), a reference to the Japanese-occupied regions of wartime China.
There Monkey uses his supernatural powers to bomb the Demon Empire into submission,
but then must flee, along with his three comrades, because the Hedonian leaders
determine the quartet to be “dangerous elements” who oppose continued collaboration
with the defeated enemy, a policy that the Mayor of Hedonia announces at a grand but
politically bogus surrender ceremony. After a narrow escape, the travelers’ shadows are
suddenly sucked into a miasmic cloud, symbolizing the black market. Inside the cloud
they discover “jackpot” carp in a fetid, muddy pool, and are ingested by a gigantic
skeleton, whose capacious stomach is filled with money and contraband. The pilgrims
break free from the skeleton, return to their bodies, and continue their quest. In the final
chapter, Monkey impetuously smashes an “evil egg” (孽蛋), thus releasing a clutch of
serpents. The last of the sixty panels depicts a giant Napoleon emerging from a great
gust of wind to upbraid Monkey for setting loose the dragonets of fascism, which the Jade
Emperor had assigned Napoleon to guard.
Journey’s elaborate burlesque of wartime figures and events places it squarely in the
genre of political satire. Yet the work as a whole, with its lavish visual impact and
absurdist storyline, has always pointed to something more. Commentators have, for
instance, singled out the strong, even distracting, design elements of Zhang’s imagery,
noting how his “exploration into the comparatively systematic language of decorative
forms” overshadows his satirical attacks on reality.14 Others emphasize how Journey
unrelentingly reflects “social reality” “despite the surface trappings of a seemingly rather
preposterous mythical story” (italics added), or how Zhang’s extensive and bizarre formal
experimentation in some cases “falls short in terms of imaginative expression.”15 This
kind of ambiguous viewing experience was described as early as 1947 by the modernist
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Cartoons
writer and erstwhile colleague of Zhang, Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳. In a review of the Hong
Kong exhibition, Ye posits two kinds of spectators:
One kind will feel that it is quite good indeed, a feast for the mind and the eye,
rather like looking at a beautiful woman. Another kind of viewer, beyond finding it
attractive and interesting, will get a strange sensation of déjà vu from everything
pictured. … He will feel that much of what appears in the illustrations he has
either experienced himself, or at the very least has heard others talking about.
Some are events of the past, others the burning issues of the day.16
In part, Ye’s comments reflect what he, as a Shanghai cultural sophisticate, perceived as
the cultural ignorance of the Hong Kong audience. At the same time, he evokes the visual
pleasure of viewing Journey, how the sheer surface entertainment elicited by its colorful,
at times even sexually arousing, imagery tends to obscure more serious underlying
messages. This doubled viewing experience intimates a level of allegory in Zhang’s
Journey that shifts attention away from political satire and toward the aesthetics of the
popular, crowd-pleasing, pictorial-based genre of manhua.
Zhang Guangyu and the Making of

(p. 220)
Manhua
To understand why Journey asks to be read beyond satire, it helps to trace Zhang’s career
over the three decades preceding 1945. Growing interest in Zhang Guangyu over the past
decade or so has shown him to be a treaty-port Renaissance man in the field of
commercial art: a designer of advertisements, cigarette cards, and calendar posters for
companies likes Nanyang Tobacco and British-American Tobacco, a pioneer in modern
Chinese furniture design, a costume designer for early film, an innovator in modernizing
Chinese-language typography, author of China’s first comprehensive book on
international commercial design, and, of course, an accomplished cartoonist and
caricaturist.17 But if we seek the center of gravity of Zhang’s creative identity among all
these activities, we find it in his work with pictorial magazines. In fact, the nexus between
manhua and pictorials was largely engineered by Zhang, as we can see in a review of his
active role in Shanghai’s pictorial press.
Turning first to Zhang’s early career, we discover how he used the medium of the
pictorial to construct his public identity as an artist. That process began in 1918 and
1919, during his apprenticeship at the arts and variety magazine World Pictorial (世界畫
報), a publication of the Shanghai Shengsheng Fine Arts Company.18 The pages of World
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Cartoons
Pictorial include a variety of illustrations signed by Zhang as well as sketches explicitly

depicting him as an artist. In one sketch, for instance, Zhang is shown painting en plein
air, brush in hand and palette balanced on his forearm (Fig. 2). It was also at World
Pictorial that he invented the pen name Guangyu that he used for the rest of his artistic
career. His signature, which he included on his illustrations in the magazine from cover
pictures to advertisements to fashion and current event sketches, has particular
prominence. In one case Zhang even hides his English-language initials, K. Y., in the
corner of a painting drawn in the background of a cover illustration, thus adding a
curious depth to his image of creative ownership. The signatures also draw attention to
themselves for their experimental flourishes, inspired by the elaborate signatures of the
American illustrators, like Harrison Fisher and Charles Dana Gibson, whom Zhang and
his colleagues emulated (Fig. 3).
After establishing his

professional presence on
the pages of World
Pictorial, Zhang soon
struck out on his own in
the rough-and-tumble
world of Shanghai’s
pictorial press. In 1921, he
cofounded China’s first
film magazine, The Motion
Picture Review (影戲雜誌).
Between 1925 and 1927,
while working his day job
at Nanyang Tobacco, he
worked very briefly at
Figure 2 A sketch of the young Zhang Guangyu.
Pictorial Shanghai (上海畫
World Pictorial, November 1918, no. 4.
報) before founding and
editing China Camera
News (三日畫報), an arts and society tabloid featuring photography and cartoons that ran
for 169 issues.19 Beyond helping establish a professional artistic persona, and of course
generating income, making and marketing pictorials attracted a network of like-minded
associates. Zhang, for instance, came to know an important future coeditor, Ye Qianyu,
after Ye was hired as an assistant in the (p. 221) production of China Camera News.20 Not
long afterward, in 1927, Zhang organized his circle of acquaintances—photographers,
illustrators, and commercial artists—around a company called China Fine Art Printing
and Publishing to launch Shanghai Sketch (上海漫畫) (1928–1930).21 Acting as general
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Cartoons
manager and chief editor for Shanghai Sketch, Zhang oversaw this large-format, color
weekly’s publication from April 1928 to June 1930. Under his leadership, Shanghai
Sketch also functioned as a networking node for the recently founded Shanghai Sketch
Association, a loose confederation originally comprising eleven young, mostly amateur,
commercial artists, for whom Zhang and another veteran commercial artist, Ding Song 丁
悚, acted informally as mentors.22
Shanghai Sketch has for

several reasons been
foregrounded as a key
moment in the
consolidation of the genre
of Chinese manhua.23
First, as mentioned above,
the magazine was directly
linked to the Shanghai
Sketch Association,
comprised mostly of
cartoonists; second,
Shanghai Sketch stood out
among peer publications
Click to view larger because it committed a
Figure 3 An early signature by Zhang Guangyu, relatively large amount of
emulating the style of American illustrators. World its content to cartoons,
Pictorial, August 1918, no. 1.
both single-panel and
series, including Ye
Qianyu’s celebrated and long-running comic Mr. Wang (王先生). In terms of professional
affiliations and content, Shanghai Sketch did indeed lay a foundation for the “golden age”
of manhua of the mid-1930s. Not to be overlooked, however, is that the histories singling
out Shanghai Sketch as a step forward in the formation of manhua as a free-standing
genre are all written in hindsight; that is, during or after the (p. 222) consolidation of
manhua during its peak of popularity from 1934 to 1937. The eventual success of manhua
art prompted its advocates to write histories of the genre, and those historical surveys
tend to place the magazine within a teleology of generic development. Obviously, such
histories were not a part of the discourse of manhua in the late 1920s, during the two-
year run of Shanghai Sketch when, in China, the genre was young and its future unclear.
A wide-angle look at Shanghai Sketch in fact challenges the notion that the meaning of
manhua can even be delimited to what we think of as “cartoons.”
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Cartoons
While Shanghai Sketch was

not the first Chinese
magazine to include manhua
in its content, it was the first
to use the word manhua in
its name. In that specific
context—the title of a
pictorial variety magazine—
the word manhua does not
directly refer to the cartoons
in their own right. Rather, it
is a lexeme derived
interculturally, from the
global semantic framework
Click to view larger of early-twentieth-century
Figure 4 Cover of Shanghai Sketch, April 13, 1929. pictorials. In China, as well
as various metropolitan
centers throughout Asia, the
names for such magazines,
and illustrated satire
magazines in particular, were
typically transliterations or
transformations of Euro-
American satire magazines
like Puck or Punch.24 Indeed,
China’s first periodical fully
dedicated to illustrated satire
had the bilingual English and
Chinese (p. 223) name
Shanghai Puck 上海潑克 (1918–
1919), making it “an integral
part of global trends and
Figure 5 Cover of The Sketch, October 12, 1921. circulations of satirical
journalism.”25 Such was also
the case for Shanghai Sketch, where the word sketch in the Chinese magazine’s English
title was likely borrowed from a British weekly called The Sketch: A Journal of Art and
Actuality (1893–1959), which circulated among Shanghailanders and other English-
speaking members of China’s treaty-port communities (Figs. 4, 5). Like Shanghai Sketch,
The Sketch was a profusely illustrated arts and society magazine, thick with
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Cartoons
advertisements, that aimed to keep its readers up to date with the latest in fashion,
celebrity lifestyle, entertainment, and current events. Caricature and illustration were
featured in both, as were short written pieces including fiction, travel notes, portraits of
socialites, film reviews, foreign or domestic oddities, and light humor. In fact the
similarities between the two magazines (p. 224) strongly suggest that the word “sketch”
in both titles refers not exclusively to the humorous or satirical drawings they contained,
which in the case of Shanghai Sketch amounted to less than half the layout, but rather to
the full range of visual and verbal infotainment found therein, from fashion and current
events to celebrity lifestyles, art, (p. 225) literature, all manner of literary or semiliterary
vignettes, and, of course, humorous and satirical illustration.
One can argue, then, that as a linguistically split term, manhua/sketch points not simply
to the genre of the cartoon per se, but also to a “visual emporium of cosmopolitanism” to
be found in Republican-era Shanghai pictorials.26 According to this view, popular
pictorials, and most prominently the long-running Young Companion (良友畫報; 1926–
1945), represent a “kaleidoscopic” treaty-port print phenomenon that is “trans-locally
networked, hybrid, heterogeneous, future-oriented, and unabashedly flaunting conceptual
and visual curiosities and novelties.”27 Shanghai Sketch was, of course, not the first
pictorial magazine produced in China; but as figures 6 and 7 illustrate, it very much lived
up to the adjective “kaleidoscopic,” and did so by aggressively blending the art of
caricature and cartoon illustration with the kind of textual and photographic content that
otherwise dominated the pages of pictorial magazines.
Zhang continued contributing to and editing pictorial magazines through the early 1930s.
In late 1929, along with Ye Qianyu and Ye Lingfeng, he founded and edited what was to
become, behind The Young Companion, the second largest pictorial in Shanghai, Modern
Miscellany (時代畫報; 1929–1937), into which Shanghai Sketch along with much of its
manhua content was soon merged.28 Several years later, in 1933, Zhang partnered in the
founding of the illustrated variety magazine Decameron (十日談). After quitting his full-
time design work with British-American Tobacco in 1934, his career in pictorials
accelerated. During the next three years, before the war with Japan broke out in
mid-1937, he worked as chief editor for Van Jan (萬象; 1934) and Thrice-monthly
Magazine (十日雜誌; 1935–1936), edited two manhua monthlies, Oriental Puck (獨立漫畫;
1935–1936) and Shanghai Puck (上海漫畫; 1936–1937), and coedited with Ye Qianyu the
short-lived manhua magazine Puck (潑克; 1937). Zhang also contributed extensively to the
leading manhua publications of the time. For the most famous and influential of these,
Modern Sketch (時代漫畫; 1934–1937), he designed the cover of the inaugural issue (Fig.
8), a bricolage horseman assembled from the tools of the cartoonist’s and magazine
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editor’s trades, which became the informal emblem of the Chinese cartoon during the
1930s.
Figure 6 Cartoon-style illustration dominated the

four color pages of Shanghai Sketch. Zhang
Guangyu’s contribution is the vision of “Future
Shanghai” on the left, above the advertisement for
the fabric company Tarantulle. Shanghai Sketch,
January 4, 1930, no. 89.
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Figure 7 The monochrome pages of Shanghai Sketch

were mostly devoted to photographs, including
celebrity lifestyles and international “news of the
weird,” such as the German tree-climbing bicycle
shown bottom right. But this portion of the magazine
also incorporated current events cartoons, as seen in
the right-center panel. Shanghai Sketch, August 10,
1930, no. 68.
Page 12 of 31

Cartoons
When artists and writers

turned to creating wartime
propaganda full-time
following the outbreak of
hostilities with Japan in
July 1937, Zhang remained
in Shanghai until the city
was invaded in November,
editing magazines such as
New Life Pictorial (新生畫
報) and Resist Japan
Pictorial (抗日畫報) and
serving on the editorial
board of Resistance
Click to view larger Cartoons (救亡漫畫). Zhang
Figure 8 Zhang Guangyu’s cover design for the then fled to Hong Kong to
inaugural issue of Modern Sketch, January 1934. work as arts director for
Courtesy of Special Collections and University the Sing Tao Daily (星島日
Archives, Colgate University Libraries.
報) and editor for the Sing
Tao Pictorial (星島畫報).
Following a brief sojourn in Chongqing in 1940–1941, he returned to Hong Kong to
continue work for Sing Tao Daily, but with the fall of the British colony to the Japanese he
moved to Guangzhou, and then to Guilin. When the latter city was taken over by the
Japanese during the 1944 Ichigo Offensive, Zhang and his family made the difficult trek
through Liuzhou and Guiyang to Chongqing, where he created Journey to the West in
Cartoons.29 (p. 226) (p. 227) (p. 228)
Journey to the West in Cartoons: Beyond Satire

On its own, Zhang Guangyu’s decades-long commitment to founding and editing pictorial
magazines, and manhua pictorials in particular, does not of course prove that he created
Journey to the West in Cartoons as an allegory of the pictorial genre. Such a claim would
have to rely on purely circumstantial evidence. But neither can Journey to the West in
Cartoons be understood as simply a piece of political satire. This is because the strictly
satirical interpretation leaves out Chapter One, an episode of (p. 229) crucial importance
in that it functions as a narrative frame for all the ensuing chapters. This frame is, in fact,
double. At the level of diegetic function, it stages the main narrative by presenting a story
Page 13 of 31

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within a story, a strategy that conveniently allows Zhang to launch his tale in progress,
without lengthy buildup. But, as a work of manhua, Journey is a predominantly visual text,
and it is at the level of illustration that the first chapter of Journey generates another
frame, a conceptual one born of transcultural encounter and defined by a certain practice
of reading. This double framing acts as the governing structure of Zhang’s Journey. Its
prominence alerts us to view the main narrative not just as political satire, but as a
retrospection upon the kaleidoscopic imagination of pictorial magazines, and in particular
manhua pictorials.
Turning first to the written narrative of Chapter One, we find a fairy tale of sorts. A wise
king of antiquity dreams of a visit from the Elder of History (歷史老人), who carries a
crystal orb in one hand and holds the Book of Heaven under his arm. Giving the orb to the
king, the Elder announces: “The world is vast and filled with wonders. Your puny
kingdom, what does it amount to? I bestow upon you this orb. Look carefully within, and
behold the myriad changes!” The rather greedy king demands to have the Book as well,
but is rebuffed by the Elder, who promptly “disappears without a trace.” The narration to
the second panel describes the king awakening to find the orb is in fact real. It rests in
his hands, smooth and featureless on its surface but aglow with shifting patterns in its
depths. The third panel’s narration, just one sentence long, tells of the king seeing within
the orb a shanhai yuditu (山海輿地圖), or mappa mundi, in which he spots his own country.
At first delighted by observing his lands in living detail, even down to the doings of his
own court and officials, the king is suddenly perturbed by the implications of a device
that can, beyond his power, represent the inner workings of his state. Just as he is about
to smash the orb, the Elder of History “bursts from a corner of the room in a flash of
auspicious light.” In the narration to the next panel, the Elder tells the king to stay his
hand, explaining that the Book of Heaven is inside the orb. In the sixth and final panel of
Chapter One, the king asks how he is to read the Book if it is inside the orb. At this the
Elder, with a laugh, points into the orb and tells the king that Monkey and his three
colleagues are even now on their way to obtain the Book for him from Sukhāvatī (極樂世
界), the Buddhist “Land of Bliss” or “Western Paradise.”
Where the written portion of Chapter One gets the main narrative up and running by
identifying the main characters’ quest for the Book of Heaven, the accompanying visual
narrative does two things. On one hand, it tells the story of a transcultural encounter,
expressed in the transfer of the orb from the Elder to the king. At the same time, the
illustrations in Chapter One introduce a mode of reading. That mode, constructed as a
visual relation between the king and the orb, duplicates the visual relation between
reader and pictorial magazine. Most critically, in the sixth and last panel of the first
chapter Zhang manipulates point of view in a way that frames the subsequent, satirical
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chapters as if occurring within the allegorical space of an imaginary manhua pictorial writ
large.
The most striking feature

of the first panel is
Zhang’s caricature of both
the king and the Elder of
History. The former is clad
in the orientalized garb of
the First Qin (p. 230)
Emperor, while the latter

wears a cartoonishly
Westernized Biblical robe
and sports a golden halo,
long beard, and white
angel wings (Fig. 9). The
Click to view larger two figures appear in a
Figure 9 Journey to the West in Cartoons, Chapter 1, dream balloon, with the
panel 1. king shown as a
supplicant, arms
outstretched to eagerly receive the orb, upon which his eyes are fixed intently. The Elder,
meanwhile, holds the orb high as he rather condescendingly urges the ruler of this “puny
kingdom” to view the world of “wonders” and “myriad changes.” Panel two, which might
be described in cinematic language as a medium shot, repeats the trope of the gaze by
showing the king sitting in bed, his eyes still fixed on the orb, which compositionally
dominates the center of the panel by emitting beams of golden light that radiate out to fill
the panel’s background (Fig. 10). Also in this panel the king is shown holding the globe
before his eyes, very much in the position of a reader—in this case, a reader of leisure
reclining in bed.
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The third panel reiterates

the posture of reading by
providing a frontal close-
up of the king, only his
eyes, ears, and fingers
visible around the edges of
the orb, which fills the
frame to reveal the oceans
and continents of the
mappa mundi (Fig. 11).
The king, in other words,
is shown viewing the orb
precisely as one would
view a book or magazine.
The orb as shown is not
Figure 10 Chapter 1, panel 2.
“reading” matter, strictly
speaking, but a picture,
and more specifically a
“world-picture” of sorts
that includes China, as
implied by the Sinicized
image of the king. Panel
four shows the king, still
sitting in bed, raising the
orb over his head in order
to smash it. The Elder,
meanwhile, is drawn
rushing out of the upper
(p. 231) (p. 232) left
corner of the panel,

gesturing urgently at the
king (Fig. 12). Panel five
then shifts to a close-up of
the Elder’s hand, framed by blue lightning bolts, pointing into the orb, where the Book of
Heaven floats among white clouds (Fig. 13). As for the king, he is again depicted in the
posture of reading, with only his face and elongated fingers visible in the panel’s bottom
right corner as he holds up the orb and looks intently within it at the Book. In the sixth
and final panel of Chapter One, the point of view shifts to that of the king, so that we, like
him, gaze into the orb as if inches from its surface (Fig. 14). We see what the king sees:
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Monkey, Tripitaka, Monk Sha, and Pig depicted in profile, moving through clouds and
mountains on their quest to retrieve the Book from the Western Paradise.
As the summary above already suggests, several features of Chapter One invite us to read
it as an allegory of the introduction of pictorial magazines, and specifically the manhua
pictorial, to China. The first of these features is, of course, the exchange of the orb from
the Western Elder to the Sinicized king. Zhang Guangyu and other manhua artists of the
1930s regarded their art as a Western import whose popularization and elaboration
depended heavily on the medium of the pictorial magazine, which was also considered a
Western cultural import.30 In his 1935 article “The Development of Chinese Manhua,”
cartoonist Huang Shiying 黃士英 unequivocally refers to Chinese manhua as “a product of
western culture” that originated from the publication of China’s first illustrated
supplement, Dianshizhai Pictorial (點石齋畫報), founded in 1884 by the British
businessman Ernest Major (Fig. 15). Huang’s historical narrative of the genre over the
ensuing five decades finds the high points of manhua’s development coinciding with the
publication of pictorial magazines dedicated to this visual form, from Shen Bochen’s 沈伯
塵 (1889–1920) Shanghai Puck to World Pictorial, through Shanghai Sketch, and then on
to the mid-1930s boom in manhua pictorials.31 In a companion piece to Huang’s history,
another cartoonist, Wang Zimei 汪子美, deemphasizes the nineteenth-century pictorial
roots of manhua, stressing instead how in the early 1930s the consolidation of manhua as
an independent visual art form depended “parasitically” upon the magazine market.
According to Wang, manhua survived the termination of Shanghai Sketch in 1930 because
of a rise in demand for “fresh” content from popular magazines, most notably China’s
leading pictorials The Young Companion and Modern Miscellany. Chinese manhua, Wang
continues, advanced from “bud to splendid blossom, even magnificence” with the
appearance of the manhua pictorial Modern Sketch in 1934, the publication that led the
way for a raft of related magazines in which new and veteran cartoonists developed their
art.32 Read against Huang’s and Wang’s histories, panel one of Journey opens the way
toward interpreting the orb as much more than a diegetic prop for the main, satirical
narrative.
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Further reinforcing the

parallel between the orb
and the pictorial magazine
is the sensationalist and
global nature of the orb’s
visual scope. When Huang
Shiying referred to
Dianshizhai Pictorial as the
starting point of China’s
manhua, he was pointing
to a new form of popular
illustration designed to
excite and inform a
Click to view larger popular audience.
Figure 14 Chapter 1, panel 6. Dianshizhai succeeded
because of its emphasis on
the “new” and “sensational,” much of it comprising fanciful depictions of the “west.”33
That sensational, visual, kaleidoscopic style defined the pictorial magazine as a mass-
market commodity in China’s (p. 233) (p. 234) treaty ports. Like the Elder’s orb, it
allowed its readers to “behold the myriad changes” in a world “vast and filled with
wonders.”
Panel three, a frontal close-up of the king peering closely at the mappa mundi, gives
visual emphasis to precisely the “worldview” offered by this kind of pictorial
infotainment. In fact, five of the six panels in Chapter One show the king looking directly
at the orb, and in four of those Zhang draws him reading a book or magazine in the
posture of a consumer of light, leisure-time reading—precisely the market niche of
pictorial magazines. Following through on this pattern of visual positioning, the sixth and
final panel of Chapter One, which aligns the spectator’s point of view with that of the
king, invites us to “read” the remainder of Journey as if it were a pictorial magazine.
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Another element of
Zhang’s allegorical
layering is the Book of
Heaven. What precisely is
it? The conventional
explanation, first broached
by Zhang’s cartoonist
colleague Liao Bingxiong
upon the first exhibition of
Journey in Chongqing,
proposes that the book
Monkey and company seek
is actually the “Sutra of
Democracy” (民主真經).34
Click to view larger From that perspective,
Figure 15 The first page of Huang Shiying’s 1935 Journey to the West in
history of Chinese manhua. Dianshizhai Pictorial is
Cartoons represents the
shown center right. The two images below it are
from World Pictorial, where Zhang Guangyu strictly political quest of
apprenticed in 1918–1919. delivering a just and
democratic regime to the
oppressed people of China. The other approach, of course, is to understand the Book of
Heaven, the prize so strongly desired by the king in Chapter One, as the manhua pictorial
writ large. And indeed, the ensuing nine chapters of Zhang’s Journey revisit the
cosmopolitan, kaleidoscopic “visual emporium” of an entire print genre. (p. 235)
(p. 236) When read against, or alongside, the political satire of the remaining fifty panels,
the visual narrative of Journey very much reproduces the mélange of transcultural,
cosmopolitan imagery that defined the golden age of the manhua pictorial. Moolaland is a
critique of the Nationalist regime’s inflationary economic policy, but it is also a showcase
for political caricature, exotic locales, and lavish celebrity lifestyles. The Kingdom of
Ancient Aegysine is an exposé of the secret police, but one whose multifarious visual style
—quoting Disney, Pharaonic Egyptian art, and traditional Chinese motifs—celebrates the
global eclecticism of manhua at its peak in the 1930s. And true, Dream Hedonia does
unmask the decadent, pleasure-seeking society of Chongqing’s wartime elite. But the
imagery of this fanciful city, from space-age floating pleasure palaces to modernist
beauty salons and an extravagant masquerade ball, revisits the visual emporium of the
pictorials Zhang had spent his career editing and designing. As for the “False Qin”
Demon Empire, here Zhang confounds the photojournalistic imagery of grand state
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ceremony often seen in pictorials by portraying the surrender of the Demon Empire in
exaggerated, even grotesque, manhua style.
These many parallels between the visual field of Journey to the West in Cartoons and the
kaleidoscopic content and format of manhua pictorials are, I suggest, quite deliberate.
Shanghai pictorials of the 1920s and 1930s were, as Richard Vinograd asserts, “layered
mediascapes” guided by an “esthetics of unpredictability,” “fragmented and delirious
virtual spaces” akin to dreamworlds, or to Foucauldian heterotopias that represent,
contest, and invert.35 As perhaps the chief architect of this pictorial aesthetic, Zhang
Guangyu constructed Journey as a tour de force retrospection upon an entire unruly
genre of popular-political discourse.
Conclusion
Shortly after the four pilgrims arrive in Hedonia, the Mayor orders his Secretariat to
produce for them a travel guide to the city (Fig. 16). The second panel of the fifth chapter
shows Pig reading this guide, which Zhang has drawn as a large-format magazine
(indeed, larger than Pig himself) whose cartoonish cover features a high-kicking showgirl,
a hula dancer, fireworks, and several Hedonian dirigibles. The grinning, drooling,
thoroughly delighted Pig announces to Tripitaka, “Master, the Book of Heaven has been
right here all along!”36
We might dismiss Pig’s

response to the guide as
no more than a gag; he is,
after all, a figure of
legendary lust and
impetuousness. But why
not take Pig at his word?
Perhaps Zhang is telling
us, through Pig, that, yes,
the oversized, manhua-
festooned, infotainment
pictorial truly is the Book
of Heaven, and that the
crowd-pleasing, colorful
genre of the pictorial
Figure 16 Pig reads the travel guide to Hedonia.
should indeed be
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considered a Sutra of Democracy. If so, Zhang would not be the first to take that position.
His friend and colleague in the pictorial business, Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906–1968), had
said much the same in late 1934, not long after he had begun collaborating with Zhang to
launch a flotilla of high-profile (p. 237) pictorials under Shao’s new company, Modern
Publications Ltd.37 In an article published in Modern Miscellany, Shao relates his
response to someone who asks why he was committing his energies to pictorial
magazines rather than “serious publications devoted purely to literature and art.”
Current literary magazines, Shao observes, are aimed at such a tiny, highly educated
segment of the population that “it barely makes a difference if they exist or not.”38
Moreover, he adds, in contrast to avant-garde literary journals, with circulations from
1,000 to at most 10,000, pictorials like Modern Miscellany and The Young Companion
enjoy print runs reaching 60,000 to 70,000. Shao goes on to express a particular disdain
for the democratic pretensions held by proponents of “mass language” (大眾語言)
literature, which he describes as a “plaything of a leisured class” that not only fails to
understand literature but treats the masses like “apes they can forcibly train.”39
Pictorials, however, use images to attract people to letters, making reading a pleasure
rather than a chore. As Shao puts it, “Only after using pictures to satisfy their eyes and
humor to relax their nerves can you irrigate their souls with ideas.”40 Shao Xunmei, as a
publisher, and Zhang Guangyu, as an artist-entrepreneur, both invite us to take another
look at the print genre of pictorials as an intellectually influential and politically
significant element of the culture of reading in Republican-era China. For all their mass
appeal, or perhaps because of it, pictorials were intellectually sidelined by the more
“serious” pursuit of engaged literature. Today, too, pictorial magazines fall (p. 238)
between cracks in the academic division of labor because “they do not belong to the
disciplines of history, literature, or visual arts proper.”41 As for manhua, Zhang’s visually
evocative, profoundly heterogeneous, and fundamentally self-reflexive cartoon journey
prompts us to examine more closely those hybrid verbal-visual forms that confound
traditional generic boundaries.
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the West in Cartoons]. Qingming 清明 3 (July 16, 1946).
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Zheng Liangcheng 鄭良誠. “Niubizi Huazhan kan hou” “牛鼻子畫展”看後 [Upon viewing the
Niubizi Exhibition]. Zhengyibao 正義報, September 17, 1944: 4.
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Zhengyibao 正義報. “Weilao Rongjun Zhan shiri qi juxing” 慰勞榮軍展十日起舉行 [Veterans’

Benefit Exhibition to open on the 10th]. Zhengyibao 正義報, September 8, 1944: 3.
Zhengyibao 正義報. “Niubizi Huazhan wei Wuhua Zhongxue mujuan” 牛鼻子畫展為五華中學
募捐 [Niubizi Exhibition donates to Wu Hua Middle School]. Zhengyibao 正義報, September
30, 1944: 3
Zou Jianlin 鄒建林. “Minguo wenyi zhong de ‘gaixie jingdian’ xianxiang: Cong Liao
Bingxiong Maoguo Chunqiu tan qi” 民國文藝中的“改寫經典”現象: 從廖冰兄“貓國春秋”談起 [The
phenomenon of “rewriting the classics” in Nationalist-era literature and art: The case of
Liao Bingxiong’s Spring and Autumn in the Cat Kingdom]. Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究
(Literature and art studies) 6 (2011): 125–133.
Notes:
(1.) Bi Keguan 畢克官 and Huang Yuanlin 黃遠林, Zhongguo manhua shi 中國漫畫史 [A
history of Chinese cartoons] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006), 190–191; Edward
M. Gunn, “Literature and Art of the War Period,” in China’s Bitter Victory: The War with
Japan, 1937–1945, ed. James C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe,
1993), 249; Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture, 126–127; Shen Xueli 申雪莉,
“Zhang Guangyu lianhuanhua Xiyou manji yinyushi fengge tanxi” 張光宇連環漫畫“西遊漫
記”隱喻式風格探析 [An examination of the metaphorical style in Zhang Guangyu’s series-
manhua Journey to the West in Cartoons], Meishu daguan 美術大觀 [Art panorama] 3
(August 2013); Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley:
University of California Press. 1996), 120–121.
(2.) Zhang Guangyu 張光宇, “Zixu Xiyou Manji” 自序“西遊漫記” [Author’s preface to Journey
to the West in Cartoons], Qingming 清明 3 (July 16, 1946).
(3.) Gunn, “Literature and Art of the War Period,” 247.
(4.) Cartoons were exhibited frequently during the first several years of the war, but
primarily as a government-supported arm of the anti-Japanese propaganda movement
directed at the illiterate or semiliterate population outside major cities. The exhibitions of
the mid-1940s, by contrast, were aimed more toward the kind of middlebrow audience
that had been fans of political satire in manhua through the prewar years. Examples
include Ding Cong’s participation in the Modern Art Exhibition alongside Paris-trained
painters like Pang Xunqin 龐薰琹 (1906–1985), as well as his showing of the satirical scroll
Images of Today (現象圖), also in Chengdu, during the winter of 1944 (see Sullivan, Art
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and Artists of Twentieth-Century China, 15); Huang Yao held two cartoon exhibitions in
Kunming in 1944, one benefiting a middle school and another featuring lighthearted
sketches of people and places in the city of Kunming itself (see “Zheng”: Liangcheng 鄭良
誠, “Niubizi Huazhan kan hou” “牛鼻子畫展”看後 [Upon viewing the Niubizi Exhibition].
Zhengyibao 正義報, September 17, 1944: 4; Zhengyibao 正義報, “Weilao Rongjun Zhan
shiri qi juxing” 慰勞榮軍展十日起舉行 [Veterans’ Benefit Exhibition to open on the 10th],
Zhengyibao 正義報, September 8, 1944: 3; and Zhengyibao, “Niubizi Huazhan wei Wuhua
Zhongxue mujuan.” 牛鼻子畫展為五華中學募捐 [Niubizi Exhibition donates to Wu Hua Middle
School], Zhengyibao 正義報, September 30, 1944: 3). Zhang Guangyu contributed to the
eight-artist Joint Cartoon Exhibition (漫畫聯展) which opened on March 15, 1945 at
Chongqing’s Sino-Soviet Culture Center and later toured surrounding schools, factories,
and suburbs before moving on to Chengdu in early 1946 (see Bi and Huang, Zhongguo
manhua shi, 190). Liao Bingxiong’s satirical Spring and Autumn in the Cat Kingdom
debuted in the spring of 1946 in Chongqing, followed by a tour of Chengdu and Kunming
(see Bi and Huang, Zhongguo manhua shi, 194–200). The most important prewar manhua
exhibition was the First National Cartoon Exhibition (第一屆全國漫畫展覽會) held in
Shanghai in November 1936, with subsequent shows in Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou.
The opening in Shanghai is described in Manhuajie 漫畫界 [Modern Puck] 7 (November 5,
1936).
(5.) Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 187–220.
(6.) See Chang-tai Hung, “The Fuming Image: Cartoons and Public Opinion in Late
Republican China, 1945 to 1949,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36.1
(January 1994).
(7.) Images of Today can be viewed on the website of the Spencer Museum of Art at
http://collection.spencerart.ku.edu/eMuseumPlus. Contradiction Collection is posted in its
entirety on the Huang Yao Foundation website, http://huangyao.org/866.html.
(8.) Nan Huang 南黃, “Zhang Guangyu Zhengyu kunzhong—manhua jiezuo Xiyou manji
jiang zai Hu zhanlan” 張光宇正宇昆仲一漫畫傑作“西遊漫記”將在滬展覽 [Cartoon masterpiece
Journey to the West in Cartoons by brothers Zhang Guangyu and Zhengyu to be exhibited
in Shanghai], Wanhuatong 萬花筒 [Kaleidoscope] 11 (1946); Tang Wei 唐薇, “Nianbiao” 年
表 [Chronology], in Zhang Guangyu wenji 張光宇文集 [Selected writings of Zhang
Guangyu], ed. Tang Wei 唐薇 (Jinan: Shandong meishu chubanshe, 2011), 228; Zhang
Guangyu 張光宇, Xiyou manji 西遊漫記 [Journey to the west in cartoons], ed. Tang Wei 唐薇
and Huang Dagang 黃大剛 (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2012), 129. Journey to the
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West in Cartoons was also displayed for a week in Beijing’s Chinese Artists Association
Exhibition Hall in April 1957, as reported in Manhua 漫畫 [Cartoon], “Xiyou manji zai
Beijing zhanchu” “西遊漫記”在北京展出 [Journey to the West in Cartoons shown in Beijing]
88 (May 8, 1957), 6. The original work is still extant, held by Zhang Guangyu’s eldest son,
Zhang Dayu, in his home in Beijing (Huang Dagang and Tang Wei, personal
communication, June 8, 2014).
(9.) Zhang Guangyu, Xiyou manji, 137.
(10.) Nan Huang, “Zhang Guangyu Zhengyu kunzhong—manhua jiezuo Xiyou manji jiang
zai Hu zhanlan.” As noted above, Zhang in the 1945 exhibition poster used the term
manhua. This choice indicates his preference for the word manhua, whose generic range
is much broader than that of lianhuanhua. Zhang retains this usage in the “Author’s
Preface” to the 1958 publication of Journey, calling Journey a lianxu manhua (連續漫畫),
that is, a “continuous” or “series” manhua.” See Zhang Guangyu, Zhang Guangyu wenji,
1.
(11.) See Kuiyi Shen, “Lianhuanhua and Manhua: Picture Books and Comics in Old
Shanghai.”
(12.) Zhang writes that the loose episodic structure was a deliberate choice on his part
meant to emulate the original novel’s open-ended “sausage-link” organization according
to which “if you cut off a length, or add a length, it’s still a string of sausages.” See Zhang
Guangyu, “Zixu Xiyou Manji.”
(13.) Zhang Guangyu, Zhang Guangyu wenji, 2.
(14.) Zou Jianlin 鄒建林, “Minguo wenyi zhong de ‘gaixie jingdian’ xianxiang: Cong Liao
Bingxiong Maoguo Chunqiu tan qi” 民國文藝中的“改寫經典”現象: 從廖冰兄“貓國春秋”談起 [The
phenomenon of “rewriting the classics” in Nationalist-era literature and art: The case of
Liao Bingxiong’s Spring and Autumn in the Cat Kingdom], Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究
[Literature and art studies] 6 (2011): 126.
(15.) Gan Xianfeng 甘險峰, Zhongguo manhua shi 中國漫畫史 [A history of Chinese
cartooning] (Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2008), 163; Ma Ke 馬克, “Meiyou shiqu
guangcai de huaduo: Lüetan manhua Xiyou manji 沒有失去光彩的花朵：略談“西遊漫記” [A
blossom that has not lost its splendor: A brief discussion of Journey to the West in
Cartoons], in Xiyou manji西游漫記 [Journey to the west in cartoons], ed. Tang Wei 唐薇 and
Huang Dagang 黃大剛 (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2012), 136.
Page 28 of 31

Cartoons
(16.) Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳, “Jieshao Guangyu de Xiyou Manji” 介紹光宇的 “西遊漫

記” [Introducing Guangyu’s Journey to the West in Cartoons], in Xiyou manji 西遊漫記
[Journey to the west in cartoons], ed. Tang Wei 唐薇 and Huang Dagang 黃大剛 (Beijing:
Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2012), 133.
(17.) See Tang Wei, “Nianbiao,” 219–226. For further discussion of Zhang’s career in
design, see Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture
in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 196–
197; Lynn Pan, Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars (San Francisco: Long
River Press, 2008), 245–247; Ye Qianyu 葉淺予, Ye Qianyu zizhuan: Xi jiangxu cangsang ji
liunian 葉淺予自傳：細講敘滄桑記流年 [Autobiography of Ye Qianyu: A detailed account of
vicissitudes through fleeting years] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006),
62–63; and Mao Zhiming ed., Shanghai manhua (passim). Zhang’s book on commercial
design, Modern Commercial Arts (近代工藝美術) was published in 1932 by the Fine Arts
Publishing Company (中國美術刊行社).
(18.) Where possible I have used the original English titles of the periodicals mentioned
here and below. Where English titles cannot be located or do not exist, I have translated
directly from the Chinese.
(19.) See Julia F. Andrews, “Pictorial Shanghai (Shanghai Huabao, 1925–1933) and
Creation of Shanghai’s Modern Visual Culture,” Yishuxue yanjiu 藝術學研究 (Journal of art
studies) 12 (September 2013): 9, 17; Zhang Guangyu, Zhang Guangyu wenji, 220.
(20.) Ye Qianyu, Ye Qianyu zizhuan: 58–59; Huang Shiying 黃士英, “Zhongguo manhua
fazhan shi” 中國漫畫發展史 [The development of the cartoon in China], Manhua shenghuo
漫畫生活 [Cartoon life] 13 (September 20, 1935).
(21.) See Ye Qianyu, Ye Qianyu zizhuan, 63; Ye Feng 葉風, “Zhongguo manhua de zaoqi
zhengui wenxian: Shanghai manhua” 中國漫畫的早期珍貴文獻: 上海漫畫, in Mao Zhiming ed.,
Shanghai Sketch, vol. 1, 1–2.
(22.) Bi Keguan and Huang Yuanlin date the founding of the Association to Autumn 1927
(see Bi and Huang, Zhongguo manhua shi, 96). Based on an announcement in Shanghai’s
Shun Pao (申報), Gan Xianfeng places the founding of the Association in December 1926
(see Gan Xianfeng, Zhongguo manhua shi, 109).
(23.) See Bi Keguan and Huang Yonglin, Zhongguo manhua shi, 99–102; Gan Xianfeng,
Zhongguo manhua shi, 111; Huang Shiying, “Zhongguo manhua fazhan shi”; and Wang
Zimei 汪子美, “Zhongguo manhua zhi yanjin ji zhanwang” 中國漫畫之演進及展望 [China’s
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manhua: Evolution and future prospects], Manhua shenghuo 漫畫生活 [Cartoon life] 13
(September 20, 1935).
(24.) See Hans Harder, “Prologue: Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Asian Punch
Versions and Related Satirical Journals,” in Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, ed.
Barbara Mittler and Hans Harder (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013); John A. Lent,
“Introduction,” in Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books, ed.
John A. Lent (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 4; and Barbara Mittler,
“Epilogue: Ten Thousand Pucks and Punches: Satirical Themes and Variations Seen
Transculturally,” in Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, ed. Barbara Mittler and Hans
Harder (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013).
(25.) Yi-wei Wu, “Participating in Global Affairs: The Chinese Cartoon Monthly Shanghai
Puck,” in Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, ed. Barbara Mittler and Hans Harder
(Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), 372.
(26.) Paul G. Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang, “Introduction: Liangyou, Popular
Print Media, and Visual Culture in Republican Shanghai,” in Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic
Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926–1945, ed. Pickowicz, Shen, and
Zhang (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 3.
(27.) Paul G. Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang, “Introduction: Liangyou, Popular
Print Media, and Visual Culture in Republican Shanghai,” 3.
(28.) Shen Xueli, “Zhang Guangyu lianhuanhua Xiyou manji yinyushi fengge tanxi,” 135,
141.
(29.) Tang Wei, “Nianbiao,” 225–226.
(30.) In the words of Richard Vinograd, these manhua artists were experiencing “a kind of
historical amnesia” about the uniqueness of the pictorial. Vinograd lists a number of
“print-and-image” publications that are formally similar to pictorial magazines, with some
dating back to the late Ming period. See Vinograd, “Multi-Medium, Site, and Dream-
World: Aspects of Shanghai Pictorials of the 1920s and 1930s,” Yishuxue yanjiu 藝術學研究
[Journal of art studies] 12 (September 2013): 175–178.
(31.) Huang Shiying, “Zhongguo manhua fazhan shi.”
(32.) Wang Zimei, “Zhongguo manhua zhi yanjin ji zhanwang.”
(33.) Xiaoqing Ye, The Dianshizhai Pictorial: Shanghai Urban Life, 1884–1898 (Ann Arbor:
Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2003).
Page 30 of 31

Cartoons
(34.) See Zhang Guangyu, “Zixu Xiyou Manji.” Following Liao’s interpretation are Gan
Xianfeng, Zhongguo manhua shi, 164; Shen Xueli, “Zhang Guangyu lianhuanhua Xiyou
manji yinyushi fengge tanxi,” 52; and Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-
Century China, 121.
(35.) Richard Vinograd, “Multi-Medium, Site, and Dream-World: Aspects of Shanghai

Pictorials of the 1920s and 1930s,” 193–198.
(36.) Zhang Guangyu, Xiyou manji, 58.
(37.) John A. Crespi, “China’s Modern Sketch-1: The Golden Era of Cartoon Art, 1934–
1937,” MIT Visualizing Cultures [online database] (Cambridge: MIT, 2011).
(38.) Shao Xunmei 邵洵美, “Huabao zai wenhuajie de diwei” 畫報在文化界的地位 [The place
of pictorials in the culture world], in Yige ren de tanhua 一個人的談話 [Conversations
alone] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2012), 74.
(39.) Shao Xunmei, “Huabao zai wenhuajie de diwei,” 75.
(40.) Shao Xunmei, “Huabao zai wenhuajie de diwei,” 76.
(41.) Pickowicz, Shen, and Zhang, “Introduction: Liangyou, Popular Print Media, and
Visual Culture in Republican Shanghai,” 2.
John A. Crespi
John A. Crespi is Luce Associate Professor of Chinese at Colgate University. He is the
author of Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China
(University of Hawai'I Press).
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Print Publication Date: Oct 2016

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: cartoon, satire, China, Journey to the West, Zhang Guangyu

WHEN in November 1945 Chongqing newspapers announced Zhang Guangyu’s 張光宇

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Journey is indeed a masterful example of Republican-era political satire, but it is also a

I construct this alternative reading of Journey through several mutually supportive

Journey to the West in Cartoons as Political

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The poster Zhang designed

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Zhang Guangyu and the Making of

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Pictorial include a variety of illustrations signed by Zhang as well as sketches explicitly

After establishing his

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Shanghai Sketch has for

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While Shanghai Sketch was

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Figure 6 Cartoon-style illustration dominated the

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Figure 7 The monochrome pages of Shanghai Sketch

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When artists and writers

Journey to the West in Cartoons: Beyond Satire

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The most striking feature

Emperor, while the latter

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The third panel reiterates

corner of the panel,

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Figure 12 Chapter 1, panel 4.

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Figure 13 Chapter 1, panel 5.

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Further reinforcing the

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Ye Qianyu 葉淺予. Ye Qianyu zizhuan: Xi jiangxu cangsang ji liunian 葉淺予自傳：細講敘滄桑