Underground manga is not exactly the kind of thing you might like to see your teenager reading. Full of anti-establishment ridicule, explicit sexual allusions, and a tendency to depict life as dark and brutal, it’s not surprising that these comic books would repel many people at the same time they are a magnet to others.
Press regulation leaves many of these books with little chance of going to print in China, and financial prospects for artists pursuing comics of this nature are likewise fairly slim. As a result, many of them are Internet-only and circulate among fans who are part of that group.
CMJ, the creator of the following panel, is a 24-year-old cartoonist with a day-job in Esquire‘s art department. He’s been criticized as being derivative of Japanese comics, but his real strength lies in the ingenuity of his plots and satire.
The page above comes from “Renaissance,” the second part of the comic Shui Kun (水昆). Liangzi, a friend of the title character, entertains the idea that democracy may not be the ideal political form as many people would otherwise believe.
A translation:
1. I think democracy is a brutal primitive institution, that one must comply with the rules made by the majority is one of the few true evils of human invention.
What are people? There is no such thing as people in this world. There are only individuals. The so-called people are those who have abandoned their independent individuality and self-awareness. They are the real nobodies, understand?
2. In English, the difference between “mass” and “mess” is only one letter, which can be explained by the psychological theory of “collective unconsciousness.”
Even Chairman Mao said that Truth is known by a few.
3. When something is believed to be good by people, it cannot be good; when people chose to walk left, I have no choice but turn right.
I have to act this way. Even though I know that turning right may not necessarily be right, it cannot be right to follow the left.
I don’t know what it means that one knows, but I know what it means that one doesn’t know.
4. I don’t know what is truth, but I know what is untruth.
You want to know what is avant garde？ This is god-damn avant garde!
The next page has the conclusion to this speech:
As this episode proceeds, a bank card error gives Shui Kun 80,051 yuan, which he soon spends, forcing him to take on a job preventing other people from finding jobs. In part I, he wins a beggars’ competition. In part III, he saves a girl’s life and goes home with her, where she asks him to kill her.
CMJ’s work has been controversial in other ways, too: when Esquire introduced a monthly manga section in January with an installment of his paranoid story “Mr. Hooke,” faithful readers complained that comics were not what a classy, sophisticated men’s magazine was supposed to be about.
The images above are posted with the creator’s permission. To find out more about CMJ, you can visit his blog, or read some of his work on comics portal Zongheng.
Some highlights:
- The Sun Also Rises: A man wakes up one morning to find his genitalia missing.
- Crossing the Street: A young boy waits self-righteously at the curb while other people cross against the light.