About Manyou

Manyou

Manyou (Chinese: 漫友; known in English as Comicfans or Comic Fans) is an animation and comics magazine published in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China. The magazine was founded in May 2002 and appeared twice a month in two companion editions: Manyou · Manhua 100 (Comics 100), published in the first half of the month, and Manyou · Donghua 100 (Animation 100), published in the second half. The first introduced the latest developments and outstanding works in comics, the second did the same for animation. Published by Comicfans Culture, the Guangzhou comics publisher that the comics translator and researcher Nick Stember described as the largest and most successful comics publisher in China, Manyou belonged to the first generation of specialist animation-and-comics magazines in mainland China, and its publisher went on to found the Golden Dragon Award, mainland China's first award of its kind for original comics and animation.

Manyou's importance is twofold. As a magazine, it gave Chinese readers a regular, domestic source of news and guidance on Japanese anime and manga and on China's own growing manhua output, at a time when such information had previously circulated informally. As an institution, the house behind it built much of the infrastructure of China's original comics industry: serialised anthologies for original work, an annual national award, and a role in Guangzhou's international comics festival.

Founding in Guangzhou in 2002

Manyou was founded in May 2002 in Guangzhou. The choice of city mattered. Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, was one of the Chinese cities where cartooning and comics publishing had the deepest roots, and in the reform era it became a centre of the new animation and comics business: by the late 2000s, officials of the Guangzhou press and publication administration counted more than 120 comics and animation companies in the city, generating about a fifth of the nation's comics and animation revenue. A Japanese scholarly overview of Chinese comics likewise singles out Guangzhou, noting that the Manyou magazine house launched specialist comics magazines there from which many Chinese creators emerged, and that comics awards such as the Golden Dragon followed.

The magazine's timing placed it in a formative cohort. Academic oral-history research on Chinese animation, comics and games fandom records that the emergence of several ACG — animation, comics and games — magazines in the late 1990s and early 2000s provided readers with a wider selection of material, guided comic lovers by offering information on manga, and helped to form a community and a "comic lover" identity among Chinese fans. Manyou, arriving in 2002, was one of the titles that performed that role for the 2000s generation.

Two editions: Manhua 100 and Donghua 100

Manyou's defining format was its division into two complementary half-monthly editions. Manhua 100 covered comics: the newest developments, notable works and creators in Chinese manhua and in the Japanese manga that Chinese readers followed so closely. Donghua 100 covered animation in the same way, reporting the latest developments and outstanding animated works. Together the two editions made the title a combined information magazine for the whole animation-and-comics field, rather than an anthology of serialised stories — the comics themselves were carried by other titles in the same publishing house. Later listings of Chinese animation magazines likewise catalogue the title in its Donghua 100 form, as an information magazine about animation.

That information function was central to its era. In the early 2000s, magazines were the main platform for comics in China: the People's Daily, in a profile of the artist Bai Xiao, notes that he began drawing comics in 2001, when magazines were the main platform for the genre, and that he published stories in magazines including Comic Fans, which it calls one of the most influential comic magazines in China. For readers whose access to Japanese anime and manga had come through rental stalls, video CDs and informal channels, a Guangzhou magazine that systematically introduced new works and explained the field was a guide to a culture that was otherwise hard to map.

Comicfans Culture, the publisher

Behind the magazine stood Comicfans Culture, the Guangzhou publisher whose Chinese name is the magazine's own: Manyou. Stember's survey of the Chinese comics industry describes Comicfans as the largest and most successful publisher in that industry, based in Guangzhou, putting out several weekly and monthly anthologies modelled on the genres of Japanese manga — shōnen, seinen and the rest — alongside an indie magazine with more individual work, mostly in the romance and adventure genres; historical costume drama, he notes, was also a strength, as was humour, while science fiction comics were comparatively rare. The house's chief editor, Jin Cheng, was described in the Chinese press of the period as chief editor of the Guangzhou-based Comic Fans magazine, and a 2005 awards announcement identifies him as president and chief editor of the Manyou magazine agency. Jin Cheng himself is regarded as a trailblazer of contemporary Chinese comic art, whose career — from his signature work A Girl Named Ming in 1983 onwards — a 2026 exhibition at the Guangzhou Museum of Art presented as a thread through the whole growth of Chinese animation and comics.

The Golden Dragon Award, founded 2004

In 2004 the Manyou magazine house created the Golden Dragon Award — the Golden Dragon Award Original Comic and Animation Competition — to encourage original comics and animation in the Chinese language. Reference accounts describe it as the first award of its kind in mainland China, and Chinese and international reporting of the period called it China's "Anime Oscar". The first competition was held in Beijing in August 2004, inviting some fifty cartoonists from China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and France, with its ceremony broadcast nationally on Beijing Television; the second, in 2005, was held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, with categories across story comics, multi-panel comics, picture-book comics, illustration, animated shorts and Flash animation, drawing more than 1,100 submitted works. In 2007 the third competition moved to Guangzhou, adopting the theme of "Love" and expanding to some fifty award categories.

The award's purpose was talent discovery, and it is credited with finding and introducing a generation of Chinese-language comics creators, among them the artist Benjamin, while Golden Dragon winners such as Li Yao and Zhu Bin, and established cartoonists such as Shijiuban, contributed work and support to the Manyou house. Few magazines anywhere have built their own national awards; that Manyou did so within two years of its founding shows the scale of its publisher's ambitions for original Chinese work.

Expansion into serialised anthologies: Comic World and Shaonian S

The information magazine was only one part of the house's strategy. In 2005 Comicfans launched Comic World (Manhua Shijie), a weekly comics anthology, formally issued under the Inner Mongolia Pictorial publishing house — a move reference accounts describe as a major strategic step for Comicfans Culture in 2005; the weekly was still appearing years later, with its forty-third issue of 2014 documented by industry observers. In April 2008 the house launched Manyou · Shaonian S, which differed from the two Manyou editions in being devoted entirely to original comics serialisation rather than information, with the stated aim of promoting mainland China's original boys' comics market. The house also published instructional and art titles — its drawing magazine Yuehui had reached a sixteenth volume by June 2012 — building a stable that covered the fan as reader, as aspiring artist and as follower of original Chinese serials.

Guangzhou, the comics festival and the industry

Manyou's publisher also became an organiser of the industry's public institutions. The first China International Comics Festival was held in Guangzhou in the autumn of 2008, a national-level event executed and operated by Comicfans Culture, and the festival — with the Golden Dragon Award as its associated honour — grew into what its organisers describe as the largest international comics event in China, exhibiting over the years more than 100,000 comics books and related products. Guangzhou's role as host of the annual Golden Dragon Award competition was cited by China's consular and press reporting as one of the leading nationwide events of the animation and comics industry, and the city's cartoon establishment — in which the Manyou house was the central publisher — underpinned that status.

Fan culture and influence

Scholarship on Chinese fandom explains why a magazine like Manyou mattered beyond its sales. Before the internet reorganised the field, ACG fans in China obtained manga from rental stalls and bookshops and animation from video CDs sold at comic stalls; consumption was resource-oriented, limited by purchasing power and scarcity. The specialist magazines of the late 1990s and early 2000s widened that selection, but they did more than inform: they shaped the construction of a comic-lover identity and a fan community, guiding readers through a medium that had previously reached them in fragments. Manyou, with one edition for comics and one for animation, was built exactly for that guiding function, and its publisher extended the community function into real space through the Golden Dragon Award and the Guangzhou festival.

Its influence on creators is visible in careers such as Bai Xiao's: an artist who entered the field in 2001 through magazines including Comic Fans, and who, when he later moved to online comics with Tencent, did so from a professional formation that the magazine era had provided. The People's Daily's description of Comic Fans as one of the most influential comic magazines in China reflects that dual role — a platform for artists and a compass for fans.

The digital turn

The world that made Manyou was eventually displaced by the one it had helped to create. As internet platforms took over the distribution of comics and animation information, the guide function of print ACG magazines contracted, and Chinese comics reading migrated to online platforms such as Tencent Comics and Kuaikan. Manyou's publisher, however, had never been only a magazine: through its anthologies, its award, its festival work and its Guangzhou base, Comicfans Culture remained one of the organising institutions of Chinese comics even as the balance of the industry shifted from print to digital. The magazine itself is still catalogued among China's published comics magazines.

Legacy

Manyou's legacy is institutional as much as editorial. Founded in Guangzhou in May 2002 as a twin-edition information magazine — Manhua 100 for comics, Donghua 100 for animation — it served as one of mainland China's specialist guides to anime, manga and domestic manhua in the years when those arts formed a mass Chinese fandom. Its publisher became, on a leading industry survey's judgement, the largest and most successful comics publisher in China; it created the Golden Dragon Award in 2004, the mainland's first award for original Chinese-language comics and animation; it expanded into weekly serialised anthologies and original boys' comics; and it operated Guangzhou's international comics festival from 2008. In the history of Chinese magazines, Manyou stands for the moment when Chinese comics fandom acquired a press of its own — and when that press began, deliberately, to build an original Chinese comics industry behind it.