Guoxue Comics: Visualising Philosophical Concepts and Cultural Values through Sequential Narratives

Guoxue, often translated as ‘national learning’ or ‘sinology’, is one of the compulsory subjects that Chinese children and teenagers are required to study. The main area it explores is traditional Chinese academia, covering philosophy, literature, arts, history, geography, mathematics and many other aspects. This article is a critical analysis of comic books for guoxue learning. Firstly, it investigates the current guoxue comic market and the most commonly adapted fields of guoxue literature and knowledge in comic books, namely traditional philosophy, traditional culture values and history. Selected significant works are discussed using methods of visual research and content analysis. To create a comic – a format often seen as a sequential narrative – the artists need to consider, for example, contents for each panel, links between panels and visual symbols for representing non-visual matters. These comic art essentials make the process of adapting philosophical and cultural values rather challenging, as it is a procedure of visualising thoughts and concepts instead of stories. Guoxue comics not only succeed in this adaptation, but also in visual narratives that are easy-to-understand and child-friendly. This distinctive feature is the heart of guoxue comics and is highlighted through the examination of example works in this paper. Methods used by artists to visualise concepts through means of comic art will be useful to comic artists in the future and will help them explore innovative approaches to creating sequential visual art.


Introduction
As a nation that attaches great importance to traditional culture and national spirit, China has put much effort into educating citizens related subjects, especially children. School children are required to study a wide range of subjects, such as Tan: Guoxue Comics Art. 11, page 2 of 18 national history, cultural geography, ancient Chinese philosophy and other related areas. These subjects are part of the national curriculum and some contents are considered compulsory.
Among the compulsory subjects is guoxue (国学), which translates literally as 'national learning'. It mainly explores classical Chinese academia, including traditional philosophy, art, geography, history and cultural values. Guoxue is believed to have originated from the late Qing dynasty  and has been seen as a crucial aspect in forming national identity (Dirlik, 2011). The term guoxue is said to have been adapted from a Japanese term kokugaku, which referred to a scholarly movement in Japan that tried to revive early Japanese literature as a means of rejection to canonical Chinese text which was then so-called kangaku (Makeham, 2011). The definition of guoxue is still ambiguous. Liu Dong emphasises that guoxue should have 'roots in Chinese culture' (Liu, 2011: 49) and that it should be distinctive from western learning. Xie Shaobo investigates a number of definitions given by early scholars and summarises the definitions into three definitions: previous cultural legacies, literature and thoughts produced in China till the end of the nineteenth century; studies of the six classics and classical Chinese thought and learning. He then argues that the confusing definitions bring 'inconsistency surrounding the contemporary guoxue re' (Xie, 2011: 40). There is much more literature on definitions of guoxue that the scope of this research will not cover. In this paper, the definition of guoxue will be regarded as the third definition summarised by Xie: the classical Chinese thought and learning.
Although guoxue is not a standalone subject in the national curriculum, it is often embedded within Chinese literature (Yu Wen, 语文), which is considered one of the most important subjects in school. Guoxue contents often appear as chapters in Chinese literature textbooks. As mentioned earlier, guoxue is a broad subject that consists of many aspects. Since this paper mainly discusses comic visualisation of philosophical concepts and cultural values, I would only explore these areas in the following analysis of what students are required to learn. Ideally, older students are expected to read excerpts from classical literature to understand traditional philosophy and values, such as Confucius Analects (Lun Yu, 论语) or Mencius (Mengzi, 孟子).
The contents would appear as classical Chinese (Wen Yan Wen, 文言文), a type of Tan: Guoxue Comics Art. 11, page 3 of 18 literary language used in ancient China, accompanied with translations in modern Chinese to help the students understand. This helps students not only learn the values and thoughts conveyed by guoxue literacy, but also trains the students' ability to read and understand classical Chinese, a skill required for Chinese literature exams.
For younger students, reading and understanding classical Chinese can be difficult.
Instead of works like Confucius Analects, younger students would be asked to read simple works such as Three Character Classic (San Zi Jing, 三字经), which is also written in classical Chinese but much easier to comprehend, and is aimed at children to help them build up a base for Confucianist thoughts in ancient China. Like materials for older students, Three Character Classic for schoolchildren is also accompanied with translations in modern Chinese. In summary, guoxue knowledge, especially the philosophical and the homiletic, comes from classical literature. The fact that they are text-based is what provoked the market for creating visualisations of guoxue knowledge in an era of multi-media.
Note that in this article, the given names and surnames of the Chinese scholars and comic artists will be displayed in the Chinese conventional order, which puts surnames before the given name. Names of people will be written in Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音), which is the official romanisation system used in mainland China.
Names of works and special terms will be written in italic and in English translations, followed by their Hanyu Pinyin romanisations and original names in Chinese characters in brackets. Names of Chinese institutions and organisations will also be written in their English translations, followed by their Hanyu Pinyin romanisations and original names in Chinese characters in brackets.

The market of guoxue comics and Cai Zhizhong's dominance
Inspired and driven by the 'guoxue fever' several years ago and the demand that Chinese schoolchildren should learn guoxue in the national curriculum, national artists began creating comics to interpret the essence of national philosophy and cultural values depicted in guoxue. Guoxue-related comic books can be found in major bookstores as well as online, appearing in different styles of narratives and artistic features. Table 1 is a collection of examples of guoxue comics. The criteria for selection are as follows: a) it is based on a piece of classical guoxue literature; b) the literature it is based on is primarily a homiletic piece that depicts philosophical thoughts, principles of living and studying or cultural values; c) it is in the form of comics. The search results come from major online book retailers in China such as JD.com and Amazon.cn, and popular Chinese online book forums such as Douban.com.
The pioneer guoxue comic artist is Cai Zhizhong (in many other essays his name is spelt as Tsai Chih-Chung, which uses Wade-Giles romanisation system), a famous Taiwanese comic artist. The table shows that Cai began creating guoxue comics in the 1980s, a period when the ' culture fever' in China was taking place. Cai's guoxue comics are so popular that he has been described as ' cartoonist who has received the largest readership' (Lent, 1987: 194) in Taiwan and 'rare among Taiwanese cartoonists in that he has broken into foreign markets ' (1987: 194 (Lent, 2009: 18). His comics have been translated into several languages including English (Lent, 1987) and have been adapted into animation series (YouTube, 2010) . Wei Shu-chu's in-depth analysis of Cai's comics further justifies his reputation. Wei has stated the worldwide influence of Cai's works by pointing out that Zhuangzi Speaks has been 'used in college classrooms and never fails to amaze American students, who marvel at how such depth of thought is illustrated by cartoons' (Wei, 2001: 155). It is also mentioned that after realizing how

Previous discussions on guoxue comics
There is little literature primarily regarding to the study of guoxue comics, whether in English or Chinese. However, there are quite a number of essays on Cai Zhizhong's comics. As mentioned earlier, John A. Lent has written several papers complimenting the achievements of Cai and his skills in successfully depicting abstract guoxue concepts with sequential narrative. Wei has mentioned his influence on the education of traditional Chinese literature on Chinese high school students. Cai's impact on other countries besides China is also discussed, such as helping promote Confucianism in Singapore (Zhou, 2006). On the other hand, there are also criticisms. For example, Zhou Xian (2005) is sceptical about Cai's comics, arguing that comics have simplified the ancient philosophers' complex thoughts, and that the fixed images provided by the comics may restrict the reader's imagination and also preventing the reader from enjoying the poetic language of the original classical literature. Gong Tiantian (2014) discusses some historical inaccuracies in Cai's comic adaptation of Shi Shuo Xin Yu (世说新语), mentioning that the character's clothing, the items they are using and the architecture design in the comics are not accurate from the perspective of history.
There is a lack of literature in the area for studying more recent guoxue comics. This is expected as none of these new artists have made such a huge success as Cai. This is probably due to two reasons: firstly, Cai is the first acknowledged comic artist to have adapted guoxue into comics and his dominance in the field makes it more difficult for new artists making similar works to outstand; secondly, unlike Cai who was aiming his comics at the general audience, most recent works tend to aim at schoolchildren, serving as extra studying materials. This causes the reduction of readers and thus the decrease in significance. However, I believe it would be helpful to conduct a comparative analysis between Cai's work and more recent works. This analysis would not only fill in the gap of this research area, but also explore the differences in visualising abstract thoughts between an artist from the 1980s and artists from the new era.

Methodology and scope
I will be using visual research methodologies to analyse the selected comic works.
Visual research is defined as 'study of images, forms and objects in both visual and material culture' (Muratovski, 2016: 158). In this case, the study subjects are the pan-Tan: Guoxue Comics Art. 11, page 9 of 18 els in the pages of the comics. Since comics are graphical artworks created by artists, I will apply an analysis method specifically proposed for graphical arts: to deconstruct the visual work and uncover new artistic approaches (Noble, 2005). Additionally, Pauwels (2011) states several focus points of analysis in visual research: the depicted, the style and the form. As a summary, I will break down the comic pages into several aspects of visual construction regarding depiction, style and form: 1) layout of the page; 2) character designs; 3) graphical adaptation of textual contents through panels; 4) text and dialogues in the comic; 5) narrative; 6) drawing style. I will conduct a comparative analysis to accentuate the different styles that different artists work with. They do not directly visualise what is mentioned in the original text. Borrowing stories makes the creation of comics easier, since the original text is difficult to visualise due to its didactic and conceptual attributes. However, I am doubtful about this approach as it might confuse the reader and make them believe that those alternative stories actually come from the original literature. I also argue that this approach has gone beyond a discussion of fidelity and could raise questions on whether it can be considered as adaptation. Adaptation is defined as ' appropriation of a meaning from a prior text' (Andrew, 1984: 97). Although it involves adjusting, alternating and sometimes breaking away from the 'source text' (Minier, 2014: 16), I argue that the application of other source materials cannot be simply considered as 'breaking away'. I would not go further here as it is beyond the scope of this paper. On the other hand,

Cai's and Wang Huan's comics depict exactly what is in the classical literature. In
Cai's comic, for example, each panel corresponds to a phrase in the original text.
Wang's comics also directly depict the source literature by creating scenes to convey the ideas clearer. The scenes in each panel are correspondent to the contents of the original text. In the following paragraphs I will analyse and compare the comics of Cai and Wang, for that they have most successfully visualised the verbally-described concepts and thoughts without adopting stories from other sources.
To make the comparison more reliable, I chose the comics that depict the same piece of classical literature. I picked out an example quote from  to show 'befriend with the kind'. In the last panel, the main character is reading a book next to a bookshelf, showing that he is pursing ' academic knowledge'.

Cai's comic
As a result of traditional Chinese book layout, the panels are to be read from the top right corner to the bottom left. Although the original quote is not shown in this page, Cai used the first phrase from the quote as the title at the beginning of the comic. The panels have been numbered, but the original comic has not done so.
They were probably added by the editor to assist our reading. Cai's style of drawing   is believed to be one of the elements of a comic strip (Harvey, 1979 with the text. Compared to Cai, Wang used more specific stories. Each panel is an independent story and the stories were made very simple for the reader to clearly understand. It is interesting that Cai has depicted almost everything mentioned in the quote but Wang has omitted the last part about pursuing academic knowledge. This is probably because Wang needed to keep his comics four-panelled, while Cai did not make himself any rules on the number of panels, thus Wang ended up depicting the first four virtues mentioned in the quote.

Wang's comic
Cai has also shown his intention of creating a traditional Chinese atmosphere in his comics by adapting traditional painting aesthetics. Wang did not consider that as essential and used a modern cartoon style. I would claim that Cai's unique art style is a key to his success. By combining traditional painting techniques with modern comic cartooning methods, Cai made his works distinguishable in the foreign market, despite the Chinese-culture-based content of the comics. Wang, however, cared little about making his comics with traditional Chinese aesthetics, just like that he was less concerned with historical settings. He focused on depicting the thoughts, and this could be done with his contemporary drawing style without adapting traditional painting forms.
According to Robert C. Harvey, one element of the comic medium is ' a narra-tive…told by a sequence of pictures' (Harvey, 1979: 641). One may argue that neither Cai's nor Wang's comic has sequential connections between panels, as each panel is depicting an independent factor, thus making them less comic-like. This is to some extent true, but as guoxue comics, this is inevitable as long as the comic is depicting didactic contents such as the example quote. If the original text is not a story, there is no consecutiveness necessary. Of course, the artist can make up stories to link the contents in the quote in a sequential structure, but the story could turn out to be long and redundant. My view here is that being sequential does not necessarily mean following the flow of a certain story and illustrating the flow with sequential panels. For example, Cai's panels may seem independent among each other, but if viewed from the elements in the panels, they can be seen as sequential. Most of the panels contain similar elements: the main character, a person he is bowing to and a background. Except for the main character, the other elements change from panel to panel, creating a 'pictorial sequence'. The same goes for Wang's work -each panel contains the main character Xiaohuan, a person he is interacting with and a background setting. The elements change according to the different ideas they visualise, also building up a 'pictorial sequence'. To summarise, the panels were made sequential and linked together by the elements in the pictures, even though each different scene depicted is, to some extent, discrete.

Summary: The visualisation of abstract concepts as a distinctive feature of guoxue comics
Through the discussions above, I will now summarise the main features of conceptdepicting guoxue comics.
Firstly, the comic artists tend to create scenes to convey the abstract thoughts, since they could not be directly visualised. Each scene tells a story that helps the reader understand a philosophical or cultural concept from a piece of classical literature. When there is not a clear story in the panel, the artist could use symbolic graphics, like Cai did in his comics, to express the thoughts and concepts. Secondly, a character is often created, though the original classical text does not necessarily consist of a specific character. However, creating a character helps the artist build up the scenes and stories, and makes the comic more comic-like. Thirdly, guoxue comics could come in very different styles depending on what the artist wants to emphasise. The comic could be a salute to traditional Chinese culture, like Cai's works, or it could be modern-art styled like Wang's works, as long as the traditional thoughts have been well-communicated. Lastly, the sequential feature of these guoxue comics lies mainly in the pictorial, since the literature they adapt are often lists of individual ideas and hardly have any consistency. Therefore, the artists adapt sequence to the pictures rather than working on the connection between scenes. As a result, I hope this research has contributed to the further interpretation of guoxue comics and inspire further research on this topic.

Editorial Note
This article is part of the Creating Comics, Creative Comics Special Collection, edited