Father Jiggs in Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of Comic Strips in Republican China in Transnational Context

This article traces the popularization of modern comic strips in Republican-era Shanghai via such strips serialized in the English-language newspaper The China Press. Consumed by both foreign and Chinese readers, these comics were some of The China Press’s most attractive features, especially George McManus’s strip Bringing Up Father, which appears to have been nearly universally known in Shanghai. From around 1920, the characters, form, and visual vocabulary of comics such as Bringing Up Father increasingly permeated Shanghai media and society, with significant overlap between English- and Chinese-language publications and audiences. The use of comics for advertising purposes played an especially large role in familiarizing Shanghai readers with comics, culminating in the appearance of the first major serialized Chinese-language comics in 1928. A central factor in this local establishment of comics as a transnational narrative technology of modernity appears to have been their contemporaneous embrace by periodicals published in Japan, which were widely available in Shanghai. Japanese military aggression during the 1930s conversely would preempt the continued development of Republican Chinese comics.