Two cartoons shown above were created by Hung Chao-ming (洪朝(晁)明) and published in Shin Shin (新新, “New New”) magazine (1945–1947) four months apart. Referencing two forms of procession in Taiwanese culture, Hung adopted similar composition to reflect on the swiftly shifting emotions of Taiwanese people in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The upper image was published in the inaugural issue in November 1945, less than one month after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) took over Taiwan, ending fifty years of Japanese colonization. Titled “Welcoming the Gods” (迎神), it depicts a jubilant street procession whose participants span social strata: farmers in conical hats march alongside urban gentlemen in fedoras. Amid gongs, drums, palanquins, and other ceremonial props, flags of the Republic of China replace the ritual flags typically carried in religious processions. However, the excitement of “returning to the motherland” collapsed once the Taiwanese witnessed the corruption and misgovernance of the new rulers. The image below appeared in the third issue in March 1946, during a period of severe food shortage. Titled “Funeral Procession” (出山), it depicts the cortege heading toward the burial ground, composed not of people in their prime, but of the elderly, children, and figures who appear frail, dressed in patched clothing. What Hung documented through this juxtaposition is multifaceted: a snapshot of worsening living conditions, a premonition of the 228 Massacre the following year, and an ephemeral moment in which artists probed the social function of art before such inquiry was foreclosed by the promulgation of Martial Law in 1949.
Shin Shin was one of over 100 new magazines—many bearing the word “new” in their name—that emerged in the immediate postwar years, most of which ceased publication after 1947. Its editorial team brought together artists and intellectuals from literature, theater, visual art, and comics. Hung Chao-ming, alongside Wang Hua (王花), Chen Chia-peng (陳家鵬), and Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), were its co-founders and resident comic artists. Beyond illustrating articles, they contributed five to eight single-panel cartoons per issue under the collective name “S.S. Manga Group.” In each issue, they documented the anticipation and disappointment toward the new order alongside identity crisis, cultural shock, and economic hardship. Before co-founding Shin Shin in their twenties, the members of the S.S. Manga Group had already established Taiwan’s first comics collective, the Niitaka Manga Group (新高漫畫集團) , in 1938. Founded as a hobby club, the group began operating as a Manga Volunteer Corps in 1943 as the Public Service Association of Imperial Subjects (皇民奉公會)[1] mobilized all art forms in service of the war effort. They produced cartoons serving wartime policy for newspapers, exhibitions, and postcards. This generation of comic artists may have felt ambivalent toward their colonizer: it was Japan that taught them what this art form should look like, and yet it was also Japan that prevented them from exploring what it could do.
In the manifesto-like editor’s note of the inaugural issue, Shin Shin’s members reflected on artmaking under colonialism: “Can entertainment itself be a form of deception? Yes—under imperial rule, it was. People were forced to laugh even when they did not want to.” For comics, which were deemed “low art” and relied on newspapers and magazines as their primary platform, escaping ideological control was especially difficult. To reclaim artistic autonomy, they sought to replace hollow ideology with concrete content and “move readers from within,” toward enlightenment and democratic education.[2] These aspirations are reflected in several traits of the S.S. Manga Group’s work. Techniques commonly deployed in wartime cartoons—such as anthropomorphism and caricature—are rarely seen in Shin Shin. Instead, figures are rendered in a simplified yet realistic manner, and scenes read less as fiction than as a concentrated form of daily life. A reader looking for humor or satire might find none. The cartoon became a form that provokes contemplation rather than contempt.
This experiment did not last long. Martial Law and the White Terror silenced dissidents, and the Cold War further compelled comic artists to once again produce “entertainment as deception.” This time, anti-communism replaced militarism as the abstract and hollow ideology that artists wished to resist but could not. Among S.S. Manga Group members, only Yeh Hung-chia continued his comic career. Yet their practices stand as testimony to a postwar sentiment that exists beyond and against the victor’s narrative propagated by the KMT regime. Redirecting cartoon’s subject from the abstract to the lived, they briefly but compellingly redefined cartoon’s social function in alignment with Milan Kundera’s reading of Octavio Paz’s notion of humor: not laughter, not mockery, not satire, but something that “renders ambiguous everything it touches.”[3]
[1] Established in 1941 under the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office, the Public Service Association of Imperial Subjects (Kominhokokai, 皇民奉公會) was an organization tasked with social mobilization across Taiwan in support of the wartime regime.
[2] “Editor’s Note.” Shin Shin 1(1). November 1945, pp.1.
[3] Kundera, Milan. “The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh.” In Testaments Betrayed. London: Faber, 1995, pp. 1–32.