UNSOED Conferences, International Conference on Language, Linguistics, and Literature (COLALITE) 2020

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Representations of Chinese Character and Culture in Comics
Xuc Lin

Last modified: 2020-10-21

Abstract


Recent developments in superhero comics have seen changes to the representations of characters and storylines. The focus of this research is to examine the representations of Chinese character and culture within the comic books. We used historical texts, digital and printed comics, news (media) to investigate the representations of the Chinese character and culture; to examine how creators affected the changes of character representations over time. The earliest representations of Asian in American comics reflected and presented what had happened during World War II. Chinese immigration character (Yellow Claw), martial arts genre (Shang Chi) was the later changing. After the 2000s, the character especially Chinese representation are no longer presented as “other”, it was started with the creation of Ryan Choi (Atom), followed by a first Chinese superman (Kong Kenan) is a significant change relating to rare and ethnicity particular Chinese character. Chinese culture elements continued to rich the storyline, such as city background, martial arts, and Taoism concepts (Qi and Bagua) is presented more than earlier periods. The Chinese representations, superhero and supervillain, historical character, fiction character, Chinese culture and history are widely presented in comics in a unique storyline.


Keywords


Chinese representations, comics, character, culture