Chinese Cartoons

Chinese Cartoons
I have recently begun to create some Chinese cartoons. Although Chinese characters have roots in "pictograms"(pictures), most characters are phono-semantic compounds. This means one element suggests the meaning, the other pronunciation.

Chinese often view characters as just that, characters. They hold little artistic merit aside from the Roman equivalent of penmanship. However, I am not a Chinese, rather I use it as a second language. So I have created a series of cartoons using Chinese characters, I hope you enjoy them.

This first cartoon is the Chinese character 胆子, the pronunciation is dan zi. This character means roughly "strength" or "bravery". This year will mark the 20th anniversary of June 4th 1989, when the streets of Tiananmen Square ran red...


Cartoon II:
This is the Chinese character "gai" which mean "to change" or "reform". In this cartoon, "改 gai" is rewriting the rules "Hu kou zhi du", which refers to the Maoist system of organizing households as either rural or urban. This can be somewhat analogous to an apartheid systems. This system has negative side effects, especially due to the large numbers of countryside people who move to urban areas, yet have lower quality education, housing and health opportunities.