Baozou manhua(rage comics), Internet humour and everyday life

Abstract

Wang Nima launched baozoumanhua.com in 2008 to introduce rage comics (baozou manhua) to China after noticing its popularity in the USA. The emergence of baozou manhua signifies a new form of expression for ordinary netizens where they move from simply being consumers of comics to producers, combining image and text in a humorous way and distributing them via a wide variety of communication tools. This paper examines how the genre of baozou manhua enables Chinese netizens to vent about their everyday experiences and frustrations of daily life. It also explores how computer software technology and the Internet have influenced contemporary Chinese visual humour by focusing on the baozoumanhua.com Internet community. Although baozou manhua is an Internet phenomenon emerging from the specific sociopolitical context of contemporary China, examining this form of expression not only sheds light on popular online culture in China and the issues Chinese netizens grapple with but also provides an understanding of how digital visual culture changes across time and space as North American rage faces circulate around the world and garner new meaning after being appropriated and reinterpreted in the ‘interpretative community’ of Chinese cyberspace.