In modern Chinese culture, people ignore a cultural component or a renaissance of cultural phenomena in Chinese history, such phenomena had been overwhelmingly flourishing for about 30 years though a very short time in Chinese 5,000 years' history it influenced a whole generation completely. This cultural component is called traditional Chinese comic books (comic strips) or called old comic books which popularized all over China especially in the period of planned economy from 1955 to 1985.


Traditional Chinese comic book is one of the Chinese paintings that describe the story by elaborate unique line drawing pictures on every page with annotation in Chinese characters, so it also called picture-story book. Its pictures were mainly drawn by brush and ink, the painting is more based on realism, the painter drew beautifully every thing in the page as the real ones so it took painter much long time to design, sketch and to finish one book. But the present comic books issuing in the market, influenced by western cartoon, are all painted as the flash cartoons, one painter can paint or draw a book in a very short time. So the old comic book is pretty Chinese traditional but present comic book is not but more westernized



The Typical Epoch -China Culture Revolution Reflected in Traditional Chinese Comics China culture Revolution is also included in that periods, the comic books published in that time usually reflect a extreme society, all traditional cultures were destroyed or forbidden but the comic books at that time developed unexpectedly. The comic books published in the period of China Culture Revolution (1966-1976) is pretty special, displaying the typical features of that typical and radical time, all comic books focus on politics, class struggle.
The political speciality of these comic books makes them a limitless high value as well as their artistic value. In addition, these comic books published during the 10 years of China Culture Revolution, were all out of print even many of them were ruined after the Culture Revolution only very limit comic books still exist but they are kept by collectors as the historic legacy. All these comic books published in Culture Revolution are turning to be more and more valuable as the time goes by. The style of the pictures and contents during that time often reflected political struggle usually we call it class struggle between the labor class and capitalist class. The
comic books tried to show how the labor class defeated the capitalist class.
In particular, many of these comic books, usually each front page were set with the Quote of Chairman Mao.
The following are Chairman Mao's Quotes.
The left one is:" all people in the world should be united to defeat American invaders and its puppets."
The right one is:"never forget class and class struggle."
Besides Chairman Mao's Quotation, some pictures also set a Chairman Mao's image on the page to show people's love to their leader.
Some of the comic books would like to use red colors to show such a flourishing times because red represented the Leftist the red also represented loyalty to the country to the socialism to the Party according to the history, and some of them would like to paint the figure with a book written by chairman Mao Zedong held in hand, it means the people in China would like to read the book written by chairman Mao Zedong because the books written by Chairman Mao is the overall guideline of Chinese politics, economy, culture and education during that times.

I have still a lot of the pictures which can display the Chinese Culture Revolution much in detail. If anyone is interested in Chinese culture can contact me please.
The pictures in this articles are all from my collections. I have collected more than 2,500 piece of the comic books published 30 years ago in that speical and radical society.

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