The Politics Of Comic In The Perspective Of Political Symbol (1949- 1976)

In the long history of human development, the relationship between image and politics is prominent particularly for the development stage of a nation and a state. In a manner of speaking, it is a social phenomenon with political meaning as well as an issue worthy of in-depth thinking. For China, the image, represented by comic strips, shows its variety after the founding of the People’s Republic of China and its intersection with politics is a kind of interaction between country discourse and folk discourse with the connotation to consolidate regime. Thus comic strips is the powerful tool which enables national consciousness being effectively expressed.Relying on the theory and knowledge of political science, sociology and history, this paper comprehensively applies methods such as traditional political analysis, historical analysis and inductive analysis, with history and political science as the main research method. With the political comic strips from 1949 to 1976 as the research object, this paper aims to construct a explanation framework of comic strips as a political symbol through the analysis of political symbol theory and to show the political function of comic books during the special period of China’s political development over 27 years. In 1942, the "literature and art serve politics" guideline was established in Yan An forum. Transformation of comic books was promoted from various aspects such as the content, the publishing and book lease at the beginning of the founding of the communist party of China. After this, strip material, painting form and characters enjoyed great development during the middle and later 50s, and its development reached its peak during the ten years of turmoil period. There is a certain generality in strip creation:character image becomes modeled, composition processing follows fixed collocation and warm color is the main painting color. As a conjunction of national discourse and folk discourse, comic books show a political symbol system directly in the form of image with class struggle as the theme, full of imagination of moral quality on the characters creation and ideologically desire to call society’s sense of loyalty.As a political symbol, comic books have standardized operation in the actual operation. In the course to determine a symbol, the choice of comic theme and subject should clearly reflect the direction of the ideological discourse. In the process of creating a symbol, literature and art creators should actively take side towards the party organization and build typical characters with charisma of conscious form. In the course of symbol promotion, highly planned publishing mechanism should be established. Through common words such as nation’s history and nation’s common aspirations, comic strips can arouse the resonance of the whole society so as to realize the construction of common spiritual shape and legitimacy.