He's Made Comics in China for 40 Years, But Never Had His Japanese Peers' Luck | 100 People With Ideas

Manyou tried to copy the Japanese manga model. Forty years on, he's still stuck in an awkward position.

Jin Cheng has made comics for nearly 40 years. But the industry capital is now chasing so wildly has little to do with him, or with the company he founded, Manyou Culture.

That doesn't make Jin Cheng a failure. Manyou, the magazine he started, was once considered one of the most influential comics magazines in China. In the Manyou group's best years the company published more than a dozen titles. A 2007 periodicals market survey by Beijing Kaiyuan Strategy put four Manyou magazines in the national top 30 — part of why some call him the first landmark figure in the history of Chinese comics.

But the past couple of years have not gone well for Manyou Culture. Lai Chunhui, the company's deputy general manager, would not give circulation figures for its magazines, saying only: "Magazines — comics or otherwise — have all been sliding these past few years."

In the 2016 annual report just released by Manyou Culture's parent company, Huawen Media, revenue from animation and comics products and services came to 100 million yuan, down more than 30 percent from 2015 — making Manyou the least profitable company Huawen owns. Next to Tencent Comics, Youyaoqi and the other comics companies and platforms in vogue today, Manyou's name rarely comes up.

Faced with all this, Jin Cheng still seems unwilling to accept it: "If we were still in the era of print publishing, I think Manyou Culture would certainly have become something like Japan's Shogakukan by now. No question about it."

But he has largely stepped back from running Manyou to do research on comics instead. "Let other people do the work that makes money. I'll do the work that doesn't."

The interesting part is that what Jin Cheng spent the past 40 years on was exactly that: turning comics from something that made no money into something that did. Much of the credit for it belongs to him. It's just that he and his Manyou Culture are not the ones picking the fruit today.

Jin Cheng is a cartoonist himself, though what he drew at first was lianhuanhua — the serial picture-story booklets commonly known as "little books."

After the Cultural Revolution ended, lianhuanhua, which had ground to a halt, came roaring back. In 1982 alone China published more than 2,100 lianhuanhua titles, each printing 100,000 copies — 20 times the print runs of the 1960s. Jin Cheng finished high school in 1978 and started making lianhuanhua. In 1983 he made his debut with Miss Ming 《明姑娘》, published in Lianhuanhuabao, then the country's highest-circulation picture magazine.

But the lianhuanhua market soon collapsed. Television, still new, held enormous appeal for people who had had little entertainment before, and a far wider choice of reading matter meant these little books — mostly adaptations of literary works — fell out of favor. Publishers that had lived off lianhuanhua profits gave up almost the moment the market turned.

"I wasn't willing to accept that." As Jin Cheng saw it, Chinese lianhuanhua was then half a step away from the form we now call manhua — in Japan, four-panel strips had grown, under Osamu Tezuka, into modern manga, and that became the base for a huge anime and comics industry. So he turned lianhuanhua into the comics format we know today and carried his own work from publisher to publisher, looking for a chance.

Publishers didn't buy it. "People felt this so-called manhua of ours was a foreign thing, not something China could accept." However many times Jin Cheng went back to them, the "imported product" never won them over. "I hit a wall everywhere. There was nothing else to do, so I started my own comics company."

He started one in 1987 and another in 1992. They were called comics companies, but each was really a one-man studio. Besides drawing his own comics he brought in help, but the companies had no publishing capability of their own, and the market was not ready; both folded quickly.

In 1997 Jin Cheng tried a third time. In Beijing he founded a comics company called Jincheng Shidai Lianhuan Manhua Center, the predecessor of today's Manyou Culture. This time, he felt, the moment had really arrived.

The most direct reason was the Japanese anime and manga boom in China around 1995. Satellite TV, cable TV and educational channels were spreading, and animation imports then faced neither censorship nor quotas; Slam Dunk, Sailor Moon, Detective Conan and Neon Genesis Evangelion became wildly popular. A lot of people realized this market might have real promise.

The government felt the urgency too. The hold Japanese anime and manga had on young people made officials see how important it was to support homegrown original work. From 1995 the state ran the China Animation Publishing Project to prop up the industry, and a batch of original comics magazines appeared: Beijing Cartoon, Cartoon Pioneer, Comic King.

At first Jin Cheng still wanted to do original work, so he launched an all-original comics magazine called Comic Times. The problem was that magazines like Beijing Cartoon only looked like they were thriving; their prosperity rested on government support. A fully commercial magazine like Comic Times, with no mature consumer market under it, had almost no chance of succeeding.

After Comic Times petered out, Jin Cheng left Beijing in 2000 and moved the company to Guangzhou, which had a better climate for comics and animation at the time. Three people went south with him: one to lay out and produce the magazine, one to handle distribution, and one to drive.

In June 2002, after several redesigns, Manyou set out again. This time Jin Cheng stopped insisting on his "original comics magazine." To keep it alive first, he gave it a position readers would like. "Since readers liked Japanese manga, and I had no way to publish Japanese manga stories myself, I published introductions to and reviews of Japanese manga instead."

China had no comics industry yet, and most early fans were still consumers of Japanese anime and manga; Manyou played the middleman. It and other anime-and-comics news magazines became a first-hand source of information for many fans.

Besides covering new Japanese anime seasons, manga and manga artists, Manyou set itself apart by adding analysis of the shows and their characters. Built on news and a run of analysis columns, it found a real audience, and sales climbed with it. By 2003 Manyou was the most frequently published anime-and-comics magazine in the country, with the largest circulation per issue.

Beyond giving readers what they liked, Jin Cheng thinks Manyou Culture survived because the company finally moved into publishing and distribution: "I partnered with publishers myself, brought in the books and artwork, and ran distribution myself." Taiwanese cartoonist Ao Youxiang's Wulong Yuan 《乌龙院》 was the most successful case — a series that sold 120 million copies, and Jin Cheng was the one who brought it to the mainland.

By then Manyou led the comics magazine market. But to Jin Cheng, Japanese anime news was only a small transitional trick for the magazine. Even bringing over the work of Hong Kong and Taiwanese cartoonists was ultimately meant to turn readers' attention to original Chinese comics.

He had a hunch: "I actually felt consumer demand for comics had already formed in China. Readers liked comics but had little to read, and there was a group of original comics artists who were getting no cultivation."

So Jin Cheng and his editors went around the country hunting for original artists. But drawing comics was widely seen in China then as not a proper job, and very few people could give themselves to it full time. "It really was like being a headhunter, finding out who could draw well."

To change that awkward state of affairs, Jin Cheng started turning it over: "Us going out to find them isn't the answer — how many can we find that way? But with a platform, a mechanism, having them come find us would be a more lasting guarantee."

There was no award for original comics in China then. Jin Cheng thought a competition could draw in a group of good original artists, which would both guarantee the magazine's original serials and perhaps change what readers were willing to read. And so the Golden Dragon Award, the achievement Jin Cheng is proudest of, was born with the backing of the Guangdong provincial government.

The first Golden Dragon Award, in 2004, drew more than 100 entries. By the second there were thousands, and from the third the award's influence began to spread in earnest. It quickly made names for cartoonists inside the industry: through Manyou's promotion and the marketing of standalone volumes, Benjamin's Remember 《记得》 and Jidi's My Road 《我的路》 became, for a while, the most popular comics on the market.

And so a very basic comics industry chain took shape: artists serialized in magazines; once they had a following, publishers printed the popular ones as standalone volumes; and successful marketing of those volumes pushed magazine sales back up. In that model Jin Cheng and Manyou held the distribution channels for both print comics magazines and standalone volumes, which naturally gave them real say in the industry.

Nearly every popular cartoonist in the country gathered under Manyou Culture's magazines: Benjamin, Zhu Bin, Kexin, Ding Bing, Jidi, Xia Da, Yu Yanshu, Ling, Ai'ou, Han Lu. Besides running their work, the magazines periodically published profiles and interviews, and began deliberately building the artists' public images. Compared with rival periodicals, serialization in Manyou meant not only higher pay but a lift in an artist's visibility and popularity.

Booming as it looked, the audience for original Chinese comics stayed quite small.

In 2007, Manyou Culture's tenth year, a post went up on Manyou's Baidu Tieba forum: "There's way too much original stuff in there. It's already out in standalone volumes, and some of it is still running in the magazine too — that's just greedy! Compared with that, there's hardly any anime news." Almost every reply agreed with it.

The whole industry took the hit. Cartoon Pioneer, launched with government support, had already turned from an original comics magazine into an ordinary news magazine; Beijing Cartoon, a "5155 Project" title that had hit a circulation of 100,000 in the 1990s, formally closed in 2006.

"A lot of magazines went under, and everyone felt comics magazines just couldn't work anymore." Lai Chunhui, Manyou Culture's deputy general manager, joined the company in those years; he had switched from editing a lifestyle magazine into comics, and arrived in time to watch a whole crop of magazines die.

Manyou could feel the pressure from readers too. A line went around inside the company: for every inch original content grows, circulation drops a foot. "Readers were prejudiced then — anything Chinese was no good, anything Japanese was fine." Jin Cheng found it maddening, but had no other way around it. Whenever the magazine added original comics, Manyou handed out more free stationery, stickers and other small gifts to soften the resistance.

He held out anyway, and kept adding original comics. In Manyou · Animation 100, published in 2008, Japanese anime news made up less than a quarter of the magazine: 150 of its 200 pages were original serials by Chinese artists.

Along with greatly expanding original content, Manyou copied Japanese manga publishing giants like Shogakukan and Shueisha and rolled out a series of magazines for narrower audiences: New Bud 《新蕾》, built around young-adult fiction; Manga SHOW, a comics magazine for boys; and the more niche supplement Manyou · Cosplay 100.

All of it came from Jin Cheng watching and borrowing from Japan's manga industry. "Segmentation does play a leading role. The market wasn't segmented to any great degree back then, but because we had always used the Japanese manga model as our reference for developing this field, I believed our market would eventually segment. So we were getting out ahead of that direction."

But before the segmented market Jin Cheng hoped for arrived, the internet did.

For Manyou, one harsh fact was that as the internet spread, people got information faster and faster. A magazine whose role was simply to introduce Japanese anime and manga was already far too slow.

Beyond that, from 2009 China's digital publishing industry, with total output of 79.5 billion yuan, had passed the output of traditional books, newspapers and periodicals, and the whole sector was growing nearly 50 percent a year. Traditional print publishing, by contrast, got worse every year. Manyou felt the pressure plainly.

So Manyou began overhauling its magazines, Manga SHOW above all. The magazine, which had assembled the best comics talent in the country at the time, went through four major changes in two years. From February 2011 it expanded to 100 pages; that May it became a 100-page magazine published every ten days; in January 2012 it turned into a 100-page weekly; and in May 2013 it became a 144-page biweekly.

Jin Cheng's explanation was: "On the one hand, we felt at the time that products aimed at the market had to keep changing. The elimination rate in publishing is in fact very high — every year there are things that fail to fit the market, periodicals included. This was actually a fairly healthy move, a way of taking our own development in hand."

But changing that often drained both the artists' work and the readers. In September 2013 Manga SHOW formally closed. Manyou and Comic World both replaced most of their serials. The artists who left and the stories cut off midway left many comics readers with lasting regret, and sharper ones quickly sensed the turmoil inside Manyou.

Xiaoxin, who draws The Fox Spirit Matchmaker 《狐妖小红娘》, once talked about that helplessness in a bonus episode of the anime. He said that although he was drawing 40 pages a month at the time, the sudden closure of Manga SHOW left him without a job overnight. In the end Xiaoxin, Bai Xiao, Yu Yanshu and other Manga SHOW artists all moved to online comics platforms. That, in turn, hurt Manyou Culture further. After all, if the comics people wanted were all serialized online, who was still going to buy a print magazine?

It's not that Manyou never tried to go digital. In 2011 it set up its own original comics publishing platform, 91AC. Besides digitizing the full magazine line — Manyou, Comic World, Manga SHOW, Manga BAR, New Bud, Yuehui — 91AC also called on more artists to submit work directly on the platform.

In fact 91AC was one of the earliest online comics platforms in China. In 2009 Youyaoqi, with backing from Shanda, gradually turned itself into an original comics platform, but early on the quality of user submissions was nowhere near a magazine like Manyou, which had years of experience behind it. In 2012 Tencent entered the field by founding Tencent Comics. Popular comics apps such as Dajiaochong Comics and Kuaikan Comics only got going after 2015.

By Manyou Culture's own figures, a year after launch 91AC had put out 180 standalone comic volumes and 263 magazine issues. That same year it announced it was joining Tencent's Q Cloud platform and signed agreements with JD.com and Amazon to put digital editions of its original comics on JD and the Kindle.

But after 2014, 91AC gradually went quiet. Its official Weibo account last posted in 2016.

Jin Cheng blames part of that on himself. An entrepreneur full of enthusiasm for lianhuanhua, he preferred the feel of comics on paper. Under that influence, Manyou never moved its center of gravity to digital comics, and even kept launching new print titles. He sounds a little regretful: "Unless a business transforms at the level of its genes, the result probably won't fundamentally change."

On Manyou's development, Jin Cheng thinks the company's plans stayed conservative. "There's also the matter of burning cash. A company like Manyou, fairly mature and built mostly on physical products, already has its own profit model. Taking a big share of that profit and burning it on a new field where you can't see how much return it might bring probably doesn't fit Manyou's real situation."

The other factor is that after more than a decade focused on print publishing, Manyou as a whole had no technical edge. In Jin Cheng's view, technology was plainly an obstacle for the Manyou team then. "Building a digital platform isn't something Manyou is good at." Lai Chunhui said: "Our overall judgment at the time was that we could do this, so we went in and did it. It didn't go very well, and we didn't stick with it — that's a bit of a regret too."

As magazine sales fell, Manyou Culture, having failed to transform, changed hands. In May 2014 Huawen Media announced it was buying 85.61 percent of Manyou Culture; Manyou and three other companies came under Huawen at a combined asset price of 2.8 billion yuan.

The internet had finally, thoroughly crushed Jin Cheng's dream of making Manyou Culture into China's Shogakukan.

"Once we got into this era, a lot of the old models were broken," Jin Cheng said. "The internet brought us a lot of things."

Today's comics market looks nothing like Manyou Culture's peak. Distribution has moved from print magazines to internet platforms, and comics readers have moved online with it. In that shift Manyou lost the value of the channels it held, and under pressure from digital platforms like Tencent Comics, Youyaoqi and Kuaikan Comics it has been pushed to the margins.

Manyou is no longer the publishing company it was — publishing magazines isn't a money-making business anymore. It now calls itself an all-round operator and service provider for anime and comics content.

Specifically, of a team of about 200, more than 100 sit in Manyou's IP incubation center, which concentrates on creating and running comics content. Manyou Culture has also started staging large comic conventions and offline events. Having lost the digital link in its chain, it is trying to make up the loss with other lines of business.

But while Youyaoqi, Tencent Comics and other platforms turn their comics IP into animation one after another, and video platforms pour money into domestic animation, Manyou keeps to its old-school ways: Huawen Media announced last February that Manyou Culture had no plans to invest in animation.

For now Manyou Culture plays only the licensor. In 2016 it licensed comics including Yan Shi Fan 《艳势番》 and Chang'an: Phantasmal Night 《长安幻夜》 to film and TV companies for adaptation. "We haven't invested ourselves yet; we also feel the risk here is fairly high," Lai Chunhui said, adding: "On film and TV licensing, in certain cases we'll co-invest alongside them."

Even content, the thing Manyou has always been proud of, has lost its old reach as the company's own channels stopped working and magazine sales fell. Popular Manyou titles like Tracing Silver by Night 《识夜描银》, Instant Zero 《瞬零》 and Black Blade 《黑刀》 are no longer exclusive to the magazine, and even on platforms like Tencent Comics and Youyaoqi they can't match what those platforms have grown themselves, such as The Fox Spirit Matchmaker and Rakshasa Street 《镇魂街》.

"The few big-traffic players in digital platforms have basically filled the space; it isn't realistic for Manyou to build a digital platform now," Lai Chunhui said. They now lean toward working with those platforms instead.

Lai Chunhui thinks Manyou's advantage lies in years of publishing experience and its offline promotional resources — work that succeeds online can be published as standalone volumes through Manyou. "A lot of internet companies don't have the character of a publisher, and they don't have the function either. We do."

Standalone volumes, of course, are still an important source of income for these artists. Non-Human 《非人哉》, a strip comic that went viral on Weibo, came out as a print book last June; a first run of 100,000 copies brought the company behind it revenue in the millions of yuan, a figure that barely covered its labor costs.

But against online platforms with powerful distribution, Tencent Comics above all, Manyou Culture looks a little helpless. It saw which way the wind was blowing early, but it lost the crucial digital channel, and it can no longer push an artist or a comic into the market as fast as it once could.

None of this means China's animation and comics market is shrinking. According to EntGroup, the industry was worth 20.8 billion yuan in 2010 and is now worth more than 120 billion yuan. Tencent Comics, for its part, claims 90 million monthly active users.

A fast-growing animation and comics market is of course good news for Manyou Culture. But looking at the industry as a whole, this is no longer the major player it once was, with a deep roster of good cartoonists and a large user base.

Cover image from: Xia Da's What the Master Never Spoke Of, and Jidi