Manhua

Manhua is the general Chinese term for comics and cartoon drawing, and outside the Chinese-speaking world it names Chinese comics specifically: comics produced in Greater China, written in simplified or traditional characters. It has the deepest root of the three siblings: the word began as an 18th-century Chinese literati painting term, was borrowed into Japanese as manga in the late 19th century, and was reintroduced in Chinese by Feng Zikai's 1925 cartoon series Zikai Manhua in the magazine Wenxue Zhoubao. A creator is a manhuajia, and the written characters are the same ones behind Korean manhwa.

The print tradition runs from satirical newspaper drawings, once lithographic printing arrived in the 1870s, through Tse Tsan-tai's The Situation in the Far East (1899), the first known work by a Chinese national, to Shanghai Sketch (1928), the first successful manhua magazine, and Zhang Leping's Sanmao (1935). The modern look is credited to Chinese Hero (1982): realistic art, mostly in full color. Mainland manhua run left-to-right in horizontal text; Taiwanese and Hong Kong manhua right-to-left in vertical text.

Today much of the medium is web manhua on platforms such as QQ Comic and U17, a lower-barrier route around strictly controlled print publishing, and successful titles cross into animation, as with the 2014 film of One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes. For prose writers the medium sits in the same ecosystem as Korean web novels beside manhwa and Japanese light novels beside manga: an episodic, phone-read comics culture feeding a drama and animation pipeline, next to the serial fiction mapped in Chinese web fiction platforms.