Like modern-day cosplayers, the teenagers wanted to embody their heroes. The heroes of the Chinese opera were not unlike the heroes of modern American comic books, only instead of capes, flags flapped at their backs. Chinese opera told epic tales of colorfully-costumed heroes who fought evil with superpowers and magical weapons.

They went to fairs and watched traveling acting troupes perform Chinese opera. So where did these poor teenagers look for power? Like modern-day geeks, they turned to pop culture. These possessions are important to Yang since the attraction of the story for him is that the Boxers are like American geeks, living through their superheros. Here is the ritualīao himself is possessed by Qin Shihuang, who is not an opera character but can lecture Bao on the importance of saving the China he created. Possession rituals were an important part of Boxer magic, and Yang has done his homework. His style does work well for some things. The romance story is hard to square with the Boxers and their misogyny, and Yang is aware of this, but he does not help himself with things like this rom-com montage sequence, were Bao and Mei amuse themselves like American tourists by eating at stalls and wearing peasant hats, just like Chinese people.

Much of first volume deals with Bao’s growing relationship with Mei, a local girl who will eventually becomes the Action Girl leader of the Red Lanterns. 1 He has two scenes where a gongfu master announces the beginning of the lesson by tossing weapons at the students,Ī lot of the themes are pretty American as well. Yang actually seems more influenced by American animation traditions. Yang has a fairly limited style which does not lend itself to the martial arts, especially given what a lot of other people have done with them in Manga. Early on Bao discovers that his dad is in fact a gongfu hero. Visually I am not sure Yang’s style works as well as it could with the subject matter. The main focus of Boxers is Bao, who grows from a random peasant boy to a redresser of wrongs who will save China and maybe even get the girl. If you want to show your students pictures of Chinese peasants being flooded out of their homes Cohen’s History in Three Keys was our main text and it is in Yang’s bibliography, as is Esherick’s Origins of the Boxer Uprising. How good is it? Well he has done his research. This is a two volume graphic novel that looks at the Boxer event. I did a class that focused on the Boxers last semester, and one of the things I talked about was Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints.

Boxers and saints book