Over Drawn: The Dilemmas Facing China’s Booming Online Comics

Liu Jue

China’s wildly popular online comics struggle to reproduce the magic of the 1990s

When I was in middle school 20-some years ago in a small town in Inner Mongolia, I was always excited for the beginning of each new month. That’s when Cartoon King would hit the shelves at my local post office in Ordos.

This comic magazine, with its technicolor cover and black-and-white stories inside, offered respite from the monotony of student life filled with homework and exams. My friends and I would eagerly dive into its fantasy stories based on Chinese history and legends, urban tales set in faraway Beijing or Shanghai, and sci-fi adventures from an imagined future. A few Japanese manga books, mostly pirated, also circulated on my school campus, but Cartoon King’s stories felt closer to my life.

Comics have a long history in China. Serial picture books emerged in the Qing dynasty (1616 – 1911) and comic strips became popular in the Republican Era (1912 – 1949). But these had mainly featured social commentary or targeted young children. “New comics”—graphical stories that featured three-dimensional drawings, animation-like multi-panel flow, and narratives for teenagers or adults—emerged in the 1990s. Cartoon King, published by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, became one of the most popular comic magazines in the late ’90s. It launched the careers of many of China’s earliest comic artists and built a dedicated readership for this new art form.

But as my friends and I moved on to attend universities across the country in the early 2000s, our interest in comic magazines gave way to Korean TV dramas, travel, and the internet. By the end of 2008, Cartoon King announced that, after years of revenue losses, it was closing. Most of China’s comic magazines met the same fate. From the 1990s to the 2010s, there were over 70 comic magazines in print, but only a handful survive today, mostly adapted for young children once again.

In their place, online comics have boomed through apps like Tencent Comic, Kuaikan, and Bilibili Comics. Kuaikan claimed in 2021 that it had more than 340 million registered users, with nearly 50 million monthly active users; 90 percent of them are Gen Z.These platforms release hundreds of thousands of titles each year; some free, some available via subscription. Many of them are updated weekly or even bi-weekly. There is no more waiting for the next Cartoon King issue to arrive at the post office.

But most of today’s content lacks the charm and originality of earlier comics. Only Love , one of the most popular romance comics on Kuaikan with over 2.6 million “likes,” features a young woman who dies in an accident but is reborn to deal with her enemies and love interests from her previous life. Another story, Sijin , has over 1 million “likes” and also features a female protagonist reborn to correct the wrongs of her past life, though this time set in ancient China. Countless stories follow the same tired patterns. Character-building is minimal, plots lack nuance, and the story proceeds to a predictable happy ending.

Many creators and independent publishers are suffering under the weight of the giant online platforms. By monopolizing comic publishing, these apps effectively control the content. They demand mass production at speed, with little space for imagination.

“The whole process became quite industrialized…over the past decade,” Wang Yang, editor-in-chief of Animation Babblers, a media outlet focused on China’s animation and creative sectors, tells me. “Some [studios] were phased out, but what remained must be profitable.” Wang explains that these days a studio of people generally works churns out content rather than a single creator producing their own original work, as with novels.

Many comic artists join such studios when they first enter the industry. “If you are willing to work on adaptions, and you work fast and are responsive to feedback…you can make a stable income,” says Wang. Platforms typically pay 200 to 300 yuan per published page, so a weekly series with 15 pages each issue would bring in 12,000 to 18,000 yuan per month for the creators.

To achieve this, artists not only sacrifice creativity. Constantly updating and maintaining popularity can be demanding, even fatal. In 2019, Huishou Eryi, a 27-year-old female comic artist, died of sudden cardiac arrest after working 48 hours consecutively. She ran a top-ranking comic series, which had over 200 million reads on Tencent Comic. One of Huishou Eryi’s friends later told news outlet The Paper that she had complained about the long hours, running out of inspiration, and frequent revisions to satisfy her fans.

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