ONE year after the first four “Liu Cixin Graphic Novels” were available in Chinese bookstores, another four books of the comic series are now ready to meet with the Chinese readers. While the release delights many Liu Cixin fans, the books may continue to face mixed reviews similar to those of their predecessors.

    Born in Beijing in 1963, Liu is a senior engineer and, more famously, a science fiction author. A 10-time winner of China’s Galaxy Award, the country’s top honor for science fiction, he is also the first Asian to receive the Hugo Award. His best-known works include “The Three-body Problem” trilogy, which earned him the 2015 Hugo Award and a nomination for the 2015 Nebula Award, and “The Wandering Earth.” A film based on the latter reaped record box office of over 4.5 billion yuan (US$696,335 million) in early 2020.

    The “Liu Cixin Graphic Novels” series is a collection of comic adaptions based on 15 of Liu’s short stories, novellas and novels. The artist team behind it comprises 28 acclaimed artists from 13 countries. Li Yun, producer of the comic series, said in an interview with The Paper that the diverse background of the artist team is the result of deliberate consideration. The hope is that the artists’ well-received art styles will help facilitate the comic series’ global distribution.

    Whether the artists’ art styles will help the books reach a larger global audience remains to be seen. The overall art style of the series, however, faced criticism from some Chinese readers since its release. From these readers’ perspective, the art style is too Western and thus it fails to convey the essence of the stories.

    “I don’t like them for a simple reason: Telling Chinese stories using Western art styles gives me the feeling of seeing Chinese elements in Hollywood blockbusters — they’re both dispensable and hard to touch people,” a netizen commented on Zhihu, China’s Quora-style social network platform. He likened the reading experience to his viewing experience of “Ghost in the Shell” and “Alita: Battle Angel,” two Hollywood adaptions from well-received Japanese manga. “You can’t tell exactly what’s wrong, but you just know that’s not how they should have been.”

    Among the readers who hold negative attitudes to the books’ art style, many say that the ways Chinese characters are portrayed in the stories make them feel especially uncomfortable. A Sina Weibo user with around 60,000 followers wrote that he would definitely not recommend the graphic novels because “the overseas artists just don’t know how to portray East Asians.” He summarized that all the Chinese characters in the books are with pronounced cheekbones, slanted eyes, yellow skin, flat noses and plump lips, all of which are typical stereotypes of Asians. And this, according to him, makes all those characters look like either villains or extras.

    But there are also readers who defend the art style and the way of character portrayal. For instance, on a Zhihu post criticizing “The Village Teacher,” the only graphic novel among the first four published that is created by a Chinese artist, a user argued that there is no problem for the artist to portray the characters as with pronounced cheekbones, yellow skin and listless eyes because they are villagers suffering from malnutrition in an era of extreme poverty. He went on to explain that it is unfair to generalize the artist’s style as “Western,” because in his eyes, the artist is actually trying to combine elements of China’s modernist art style with the Western art form of comics.

    Currently, the first four books of the series have a score of 9.0 on Douban, China’s leading book, film and music review platform. How well will the four new books perform? Let’s wait and see.

    (Yu Yuanfan)