Humor, War and Politics in San Mao Joins the Army: A Comparison Between the Comic Strips (1946) and the Film (1992)

This chapter analyses the humoristic features of Zhang Leping’s comic strip serial San Mao Joins the Army (SJTA) published in 1945 and of its film adaptation released in 1992. SJTA follows the adventures of the little child San Mao as a soldier during the Sino-Japanese War. The aim of this chapter is to analyse how Zhang Leping employed humor and satire in the original strips of SJTA in order to propose a nuanced and multi-layered version of the War of Resistance free from the pompous tones of wartime propaganda, while the more recent cinematographic version of the story supported the Chinese Communist Party’s artistic principle to communicate a clear and straightforward political message to the public.