The City Image Of Hu Kao’s Comics

Hu Kao is an active cartoonist in Shanghai in the 1930s. He attached great importance to the formal beauty of art works and his comics were mostly line-drawing adornment style. Concentrated in the 1930s, Hu Kao’s comics career could be divided into two periods:the early one is "Shanghai period", which is mainly about urban cartoon theme. The urban portraits comics of Hu are humorous and vivid. City life custom cartoon made an outline of the culture of old Shanghai for us. The late period is "Wuhan period". During this period, Hu Kao abandoned showing the unsatisfied love between men and women of urban image. He began to creat anti-Japanese War cartoon to reflect the country’s feelings and encouraged Chinese people to defend their motherland courageously.This paper takes the urban cartoon image of "The Hu Kao Shanghai period" as the research object and is divided into two parts, the urban characters and urban portrait. The first part, the "urban characters" will be based on the historical and cultural background of the society at that time, analyzing the different characters of life and psychological state in Hu’s cartoon series,’The Figures". Another cartoon series, "Miss Shanghai" represented the fashionable life of the social miss and uncovered their pursuit for material comforts and spiritual emptiness. The second part is about the urban portraits. We will select a group of portraits of old Shanghai celebrities, personal portrait and artist self-portrait as the research object, based on the environment and people’s life, carrying out specific analysis on characteristics of all kinds of portraits. The third part will summarize the "two problems "in Hu Kao’s cartoon. One problem is the characters and their facial design. Many different kinds of characters are typed into a typical and representative old Shanghai characters face by Hu Kao. These images are the epitome and reflection of thousands of different classes of the old people in Shanghai. The second problem is "Caricature and the lifestyle comic ". Through analysis of the humor irony art language of Hu Kao’s caricature, we can summary Hu Kao’s comic style characteristics and genetic roots.Through the interpretation for Hu Kao cartoons of city image, I hope to review old Shanghai urban style and its historical change, reappear the old Shanghai urban cultural form, such as the residents’life habits, behavior way, moral concept, and their value dimensions, reveal the urbanite existence dilemma and anxiety state of 1930 s, further understand the specific features in the 1930 s of Shanghai comics, and to think about the tortuous journey of the old Shanghai cartoonist.