Illustration:
ill. 6.16 (set: 6.16)
Date:
1971
Genre:
comic, comic book, comic strip
Material:
scan, paper, black-and-white; original source: print on paper
Source:
Baimaonü 白毛女 (The white-haired girl). Tianjin: Tianjin renmin meishu, 1971. Caoyuan ernü 草原儿女 (Little sisters of the grasslands). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973:143-144.
Keywords:
The White-haired Girl, Yangbanxi, Cultural Revolution, heroine, heroism, villain, landlord, fight, gesture

The White-Haired Girl (Baimaonü 白毛女)

Not unlike any other artistic product created during this time, the ideal comic during the Cultural Revolution in its depiction of heroes and demons would have to abide quite clearly by the set of rules called the Three Prominences, which had first been developed for the model works. Three Prominences are achieved by making use of all artistic possibilities first to emphasize the good, second to emphasize the heroes among the good, and third to emphasize the main heroes among the heroes. In comics, this basic theory causes negative characters to disappear almost completely from sight, by, for example, effectively leaving them out of the panel frame, or by showing them from the back or the side but never in full view nor central to the picture. Instead, they are cast in the shadows, never straight and strong but sickly, crouched, and bent. Numerous examples can be given of comics published in the second half of the Cultural Revolution that abide by these rules: Here, in the 1971 comic White-Haired Girl, for example, the main heroine meets and frightens her former landlord and his servant (two negative characters) who have taken to a mountain temple to escape a thunderstorm.