Obscure Adventures in Geek and Nerd Culture

People forget that there still are a few good Mandarin Chinese Mockbusters in a sea of just plain crap!  Let me introduce you to the rather bloody amazing world of Qian Guisun’s Tarzan lianhuanhua series. It is a fantastic romp of an unofficial adaptation made by Qian Guisun for the PRC market during the post-Cultural Revolution, pre-Xi Jinping period.  The Tarzan lianhuanhua series does have more mundane looking prehistoric hominins standing in for the actual Mangani of the canonical comics and books, which is pretty awkward in itself. Still, it’s a funny addition alongside many other references to both old and then-new comic books and films which focus on Tarzan.  Besides the somewhat inaccurate prehistoric hominins standing in for the Mangani, It’s actually pretty cool to have both Meriem and Korak build a treehouse in the Son of Tarzan lianhuanhua, which is likely a snarky tribute to the Johnny Weissmuller films.  Even in spite of the ridiculous censorship, it is...

Some of the most colourful Tarzan comic adaptations come from the Iron Curtain.  China has both the Qian Guisun lianhuanhua series based somewhat faithfully on the books and the Wang Zhaodong lianhuanhua quartet based on the rather in name only Johnny Weissmuller films.  Qian Guisun’s Tarzan comics are pretty good in their own right, aside from skipping The Return of Tarzan, due to such a book being too spicy for the PRC market at the time. They’re such creative comics that they perhaps rival both Joe Kubert’s and Roy Allan Martinez’s comics in terms of all the fun involved.  Wang Zhaodong’s Tarzan the Apeman lianhuanhua, however, is a stylistic mix of both Kong Kong Manhua and Italian fumetti comics. It’s also inspired by the Johnny Weissmuller films, themselves much different from the canonical books. The 4 volume series is lighter and softer, as well as being more slice of life than Qian Guisun’s more humorous and perhaps even satirical tribute to the various official ...

The Muraki Lineage Muraki School Toshiki Hirano Narumi Kakinouchi Yasushi Muraki  Hirofumi Masuda Shingo Fujii Yoshihiro Kanno  *Besides the obvious Muraki Laser Circus, Yasushi Muraki’s Anno Hikone hybrid school remains famous for showing off so many leggy and fanservicey character designs that it’s hard to distinguish between Muraki and Obari-like designs from up until the mid late 1990s. Toshiki Hirano is indeed both a Muraki schooler and its founder, but whose designs lean somehow closer to older Obari-like styles to an extent, since Yasushi Muraki is the best known member, hence the school name.    Maeda School  Minoru Maeda  Kanako Maru *The Maeda school is considerably a more extreme parent school than others in the Itano lineage, leaning somehow closer to Shinsaku Kozuma’s very heavy liquid style. Funnily enough, Minoru Maeda is the founder of such a school, which also has inspired the decidedly less extreme yet still very exaggerated Yamashita effe...