For 33-year-old Yao Ting, a Chinese comics artist famous enough for fans to stop him and ask for his autograph, these are both the best of times and the worst of times.
Interest in comics has never been greater in China, but local artists are still struggling to escape from the shadow of Western and Japanese influences and find a unique national style.
"Many Chinese comics have no real soul, and just imitate comics from other countries, but people like me, we really think that our own Chinese heritage is the most precious," he said.
"My ambition, my dream is to grasp the essence of ancient Chinese history, culture and thought and bring it to the world," said Yao, who finds inspiration in classic dynastic histories and popular novels of the pre-modern era.
China was a latecomer to the comics scene and its community of creative story-tellers feel compelled to go for the tried-and-proven if they want to earn a living.
"Chinese comics are in the early phase of development," said Zhang Zhou, an employee at a Beijing-based advertising company and an avid reader of local comics. "Our artists are still looking for their own style."
Broadly defined, Chinese comics have a long history, from woodblock prints in imperial times, over anti-Japanese cartoons of the World War II era, to didactic drawings used to teach communist values to the illiterate masses.
manga!
But the current frenzy was kindled in the 1990s with the advent of Japanese comics, or manga. And it shows.
From the style -- the trademark huge eyes of the characters -- to the subject matters -- martial arts, teenage love and science fiction -- the main influence on today's Chinese comics is overwhelmingly Japanese.
The heavy Japanese flavor in Chinese comics is extra ironic because the Japanese were originally inspired by China, according to Tao Zhong, an intense 25-year-old amateur artist with a goatee.
"A lot of Chinese culture is now being used in Japanese comics. It's like a mirror being held up to us," he said. "But actually, Chinese culture should be expressed by the Chinese themselves."
An entire subculture has grown up around comics in China, with youngsters dressing up as their favorite heroes with wigs and costumes that make them look like something in between Tolkienesque elves and Tokyo punks.
Their enthusiasm and growing purchasing power is what instills confidence in the pioneers of the Chinese comics industry.
"Comic magazines in China have a combined circulation of three million," said Xu Tao, secretary general of the Institute of Chinese Comics, an industry association.
"But if you count everything, including comics on the Internet and imported magazines, the total market is at least 10 million readers," he said.
Despite the large and growing number of fans, no one has yet got rich producing comics for the Chinese.
After years of hard and scantily rewarded work, Yao Ting now makes about 3,000 yuan (US$360) a month, and he considers himself among the lucky few who have actually turned their passion into a livelihood.
quick bucks
"The problem with Chinese comics is you can't make a whole lot of money on them, so many talented artists eventually choose other careers, for instance in advertising," he said.
"Some artists try to solve the problem by focusing on quantity and simply spit out vast amounts of low-quality comics in an attempt to earn a quick buck."
Chinese comic artists look with envy to places such as Taiwan where an agent system makes it easier for budding talents to find an outlet and reach a sizable audience.
"There's definitely a market for comics in China, and there are lots of artists, but the problem is that so far there are no agents," said Tao, the amateur.
"Maybe it's because this kind of new profession is associated with a certain degree of risk," he said.
Tao, himself a member of a minority of Chinese comic artists who seek to tackle large, complex issues rather than just entertain, acknowledged there probably would never be a huge market for his works.
His comics are compact and entirely without text, dealing with timeless subjects such as the future of mankind or the battle of the sexes, often in just a single page.
Few seem interested in changing society with their comics, and even the most ambitious content themselves with expressing intensely private sentiments or semi-religious ideas.
Politics is, unsurprisingly, strictly off-limits, not least because magazine editors are keen to keep their licenses.
"You can't make cartoons about the leadership," said Bao Wei, a 27-year-old artist from northeastern Harbin city.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist