![]() ![]() There were 670,000 copies of this book printed. It stuck there, quivering and making a buzzing sound.” Baling Nüxia (Baling Woman Warrior), 1985. Yu quickly shifted his body to the side and the arrow hit the wall. From their beginnings in the 1920s until their popularity bottomed out in the 1990s, lianhuanhua were some of the most widely read literature in the country. While it’s true that most of the comics being produced now are manhua, this was not the case for much of the 20th century. We usually don’t think of China as having a rich tradition of making comics, and discussions of Chinese comics focus on manhua, the Chinese comics that were inspired by Japanese manga. In the mid-80s, some lianhuanhua titles had single printing runs of more than 1 million copies. Brian Hibbs analyzed the 2012 BookScan report and found that there were about 9.5 million comics sold in the US throughout the year. They looked similar to the Big Little Books published in the United States from the 1930s to 1950s, but they were published in quantities that make the US comics market look tiny. Most lianhuanhua were black and white paperbacks with a single illustration and a few lines of text on each page. ![]() In 1985, there were 8.1 billion pulp comics ( lianhuanhua) printed in mainland China. Orion Martin | OctoGuhua An Zhenpoji (The Case of the Classical Paintings), 1984. ![]() Features Lianhuanhua: China’s Pulp Comics ![]()
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