Bull's EyeThe Life and Times of Cartoonist Niu Gur

In the history of comics in Taiwan, Niu Gur is a major figure. He was the unchallenged master of the genre 40 or 50 years ago. At that time Taiwan had only eight daily newspapers and one evening paper. Niu Gur's serialized strips were carried in four of these at the same time, and he had different serialized novels running in four others! His strip "Uncle Niu the Guerilla Fighter," carried in the biggest paper at that time, the Central Daily News, provided vital spiritual sustenance to many ordinary folk in Taiwan.

Newspaper cartoons are art hidden inside news, and education ensconced in humor. Niu Gur was a major player in this realm for six decades. The number of his works is incalculable, and he created so many memorable characters, like Uncle Niu, Little Sister Niu, Old Youtiao (Oil Stick), Tsai Tuo (a nouveau riche), Second Brother Niu, Four-Eyed Frog, Sister Hsi. . . who live on in our imaginations.

Niu Gur died of illness on November 29, 1997, at the age of 72. He never had much of a formal education, but took that era of chaos and his extraordinary life as his schools, producing one delightful frame after another.

A Niu by any other name

Niu Gur's real name was Li Ching-kuang. A Cantonese, he was born in Hong Kong in 1925, moving to Hankou (in Hubei Province) with his family at the age of four. He had nine brothers and sisters, and was the fourth eldest among the siblings. He was born in the Year of the Bull, loved water buffalo from childhood, and had a naturally bullish temperament. He picked up the nickname Hsiao Niu (Little Bull) as a child, and called himself Niu Gur (Brother Bull) when he began to learn drawing. He said that he was certainly as hard-working as a water buffalo all his life.

He began to draw cartoons when he was 12. It was a bad year, but a good year as well. Japan attacked China, and the government called on all citizens to contribute what they could to the resistance effort. But what could a 12-year-old child do? In those days the streets were plastered with slogans, including anti-Japanese cartoons. Given Niu Gur's natural interest in the medium, his teacher selected him as a member of a team of "anti-Japanese little devils" to paint resistance murals on the streets. Niu Gur's destiny was thereafter tied to illustrating.

As China's fortunes in the war waned, three of the Li brothers, led by their elder sister, fled to Hong Kong. Life was hard, and they couldn't even afford school fees. To make some money for school and living expenses, Niu Gur began to draw comics, which he then sent to newspapers. Having no money for stamps, he had to deliver his illustrations on foot.

Niu Gur's first published cartoon appeared in Hong Kong's Overseas Chinese Daily. That was during the Mid-Autumn Festival (when the moon is full), and the cartoon showed a Chinese dropping a bomb-round in shape and glowing like the moon-on a soldier of the Japanese imperial army, with the caption "The War of Resistance by Moonlight." This initial effort earned him 70 Hong Kong cents-in a time when you could buy a tub of ice cream for 10 cents.

Hong Kong's education system, run by the British, charged school fees of HK$8 per month. If you couldn't pay one month, you had to sit out the next. On this basis, Niu Gur had to sell 12 cartoons a month just to pay his tuition. Each month he sent a hundred or more cartoons to various newspapers, but was lucky if four or five were printed. He was then still in his teens, with little experience of the world, and an immature technique. Niu Gur lived the next two years in a "skipping lunch" lifestyle.

Disaster from cartoons

In the midst of the war, Niu Gur's mother went to visit him and his siblings in Hong Kong, and, discovering the hard life they were living, took them back to Hankou. After studying in a British system, Niu Gur was exposed to a classical Chinese education for half a year, setting the foundations for the mixed vernacular-classical writing style of his comics.

Not long afterwards, he was arrested by the Japanese military for a cartoon in a newspaper depicting a famous Chinese general from the Ming dynasty killing a "dwarf pirate." ("Dwarf pirate" has long been a derogatory term used by Chinese to refer to Japanese.) He thereby became categorized as a "Chinese juvenile political criminal."

Later, Niu Gur got a job in a newspaper illustrating advertisements, and then became a reporter who travelled with the troops. Quite unexpectedly he came in contact with the mysterious "Red Spear Society" located in the remote mountains, and, after he came to Taiwan, he wrote a famous book based on this experience.

From the outbreak of war in the Pacific in 1941 to VJ Day in 1945, Niu Gur lived a nomadic life, serving variously as a newspaper editor-in-training, columnist, assistant, advertising designer, truck driver, miner, actor, writer and director. Yet, no matter how difficult his life, he was never far from drawing, and wherever he went he continued to draw cartoons. If he could get paid for them, it was a bonus. If not, he considered it practice time well spent. Those vagabond days, with all the richness of experience they provided, were of great value to him later on in his career as a comic strip writer and novelist in Taiwan.

On the road again

In 1946, Niu Gur went to Changsha. Because he could get by in English, he was hired by a United Nations post-war reconstruction agency, where he served as a transport team leader. Not even 21, he oversaw a fleet of more than 20 trucks delivering emergency supplies to provinces and remote mountain areas in southwest China, where he personally came into contact with the very different customs of the minority peoples of those locations. These experiences provided the framework for two novels that he published in Taiwan in 1964.

In 1949, Niu Gur came to Taiwan with the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR). There's an interesting story behind that.

The JCRR was an agency for delivering US assistance to China, and was run primarily by Americans. A Mr. Goodfriend was in charge of education following in the wake of electrification in the countryside. Looking to recruit staff, he looked for talented illustrators in all the newspapers in Guangzhou, aiming to teach people better farming techniques through cartoons (the only approach he could take with the largely illiterate rural population of that era).

At that time Niu Gur was authoring a regular strip in the Huanan Daily News based on the character Uncle Niu, and another in the Huanqiu Daily News starring Little Sister Niu. Goodfriend was very impressed by Niu Gur's work, and went personally to the newspaper to recruit him. He was hired under the title of "director of the office of illustration" at the JCRR.

Four months later, when the JCRR evacuated to Taiwan, Niu Gur came with them. The work of the JCRR focused on farming techniques, land reform, family planning, and health. Uncle Niu and Little Sister Niu became stars of these education campaigns.

But doing these stereotyped illustrations day in and day out was not enough to satisfy Niu Gur, who had a lot more creativity than that. Luckily, at that time the Central Daily News added an illustrated supplement with comics. Niu Gur boldly put himself forward as a candidate, and the paper began carrying strips featuring Uncle Niu and Little Sister Niu.

Niu Gur began drawing "Uncle Niu the Guerilla Fighter" in 1951. Finding humor amidst the tragic longing for home of the many mainlanders who fled to Taiwan in 1949 and could not go back, the strip struck a deep chord with the public, and sparked a tremendous response. Subscriptions to the Central Daily News shot upward from a few thousand per month to tens of thousands, and Uncle Niu became a major figure in cultural circles.

Niu Gur went on to produce a huge number of serial strips starring various characters, in which, says the comics critic Hung Teh-lin, he used illustration to faithfully record the sweat and tears of Taiwan's history and growth, leaving a priceless legacy.

Fei Meng gets famous

Niu Gur did not begin writing fiction until 1951. To distinguish these books from his comics, he adopted the pen name Fei Meng. His first work, Rivalry in a Gambling Country, was an instant sensation, and was followed by numerous popular novels of murder, adventure, wandering, and mystery.

Moreover, Niu Gur's own life became the setting for a lasting mystery. In 1956, he became caught up in the case of an alleged abduction of a Hong Kong film star, and spent 100 days in jail. The incident caused quite a stir at the time, and even today no one knows what really happened.

At that time Niu Gur was in love with Nanie Feng, the daughter of Feng Yung, the founder of a university which he named after himself. She was confident that Niu Gur-who was being widely kicked while he was down by public opinion-could not have been the kind of person alleged. After all, they had known each other for four years, and she felt Niu Gur was a straightforward, honest, and reliable man who would never do anything to harm anyone. She defied public opinion and stood by this man who, because of his comic strip "The Diary of Second Brother Niu," had offended many prominent people in government and society. When things looked bleakest, they became engaged at the end of that year. They were wed in 1958, beginning a happy marriage that would last 40 years. One of the witnesses at the wedding was the famous Yu You-ren, then president of the Control Yuan, who was a loyal fan of Niu Gur's work.

Following his imprisonment, Niu Gur left the JCRR, and his works were for a time blacklisted by newspapers, mainly as a result of a letter from the Taipei City branch of the Kuomintang advising papers not to carry any of his comic strips or serialized novels.

Frustrated, Niu Gur had little choice but to set his sights on Southeast Asia. Little did he expect that this would turn out to be even more financially rewarding, as his fiction was carried in Chinese language media in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Niu Gur completed many of his most famous works in this period, writing over a million characters of text (mainly murder mysteries) between 1956 and 1958.

Niu's home comics school

Liu Chiu-feng, a publisher who has reprinted Niu Gur's works, points out that 40 or 50 years ago information was much harder to obtain. Under the circumstances, writers choosing to write lively and timely detective novels with clever twists of plot had to rely upon the writer's sharp observations and abundant imagination. If the writer didn't have these, his works wouldn't grab readers' attention. Liu Chiu-feng says Niu Gur's success was due to his genius as a writer, and that Fei Meng's novels are up with those of the Hong Kong novelist Ni Kuang, or perhaps even superior.

In 1961, when Niu Gur was 36, he took a page from his father-in-law's book and opened "Niu Gur's Cartooning School" in his own home with his own money. Every Saturday afternoon he would teach prospective cartoonists at no charge. There were two successive courses, each of which lasted two years. He taught more than 100 students all told, cultivating many excellent young cartoonists, including Chao Ning, Tung Ting-ming, Tsai Tung-chao, Lin Hung-chi, Wang Hsiao-kai, Kuo Cheng-feng, Liu Tzuo-ni, Lin Wen-yi, Lin Shih-chuan, and Wang Ting-tai.

Not only did Niu Gur write novels, but he also did his own illustrations. And among writers, he had a reputation as a bon vivant. His house was usually full of friends, and when it wasn't he would take his wife out to see films, go swimming or dancing, or take outings to the countryside. All of which makes one wonder where he found the time to work.

Working hard, playing hard

His wife, Nanie Feng, recalls that on a typical day, Niu Gur wouldn't arise until 11. Then he'd eat, and in the afternoon he would work, providing cartoons for four separate newspapers in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. He wouldn't stop until about 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, when the two of them would go out to eat with friends, chat, dance, or play mahjong. The two wouldn't return home until the middle of the night, at which time he would start in on writing his serial novels. He often wouldn't stop writing until daybreak, when he would give the four overseas Chinese papers the episodes for the same day. Feng was responsible for gathering materials and handling the mail. Later that morning Niu Gur would rise and start the same process all over again.

Sometimes friends worried that Niu Gur was going to drive himself to an early grave if he kept up like that. But he held that his life was well balanced, and that all work and no play would make Brother Bull a dull boy. The writer Po Yang, a good friend of the Niu Gur's for many years, described him respectfully as "an eccentric genius."

In 1966, the Tahua Evening Times started running a comics section and asked Niu Gur to become editor. His career as a cartoonist appeared to be getting on track again. Unfortunately, right at that time the National Institute for Compilation and Translation (NICT) implemented a review system that imposed various unreasonable restrictions on domestic cartoons and comics. The upshot was that Japanese comics started to be smuggled into Taiwan and printed in pirated editions with large press runs, whereas domestic cartoonists virtually had no outlet for their talents. It was a dark time for cartoonists in Taiwan. Liu Hsing-chin, whose fame equaled Niu Gur's, still gets angry thinking about those years. For the touring exhibition of Niu Gur's work last year, Liu composed a cartoon in which an Uncle Niu was leading Whiz Kid, Big Auntie and other characters of Liu's on an assault of the NICT.

In 1982 Niu Gur decided to stick his neck out to resist the double standard applied to Japanese versus Taiwanese comics. He and his wife began a cartoon cleanup campaign, and held an exhibition of comics of theirs that had been rejected by the NICT alongside foul Japanese comics that had somehow passed their muster. The exhibition was held at the Chinjih Gallery and Number One Department Store during five different periods for a total of 69 days. It created quite a stir, and in response the pirating publishers went into attack mode and sued the couple.

Fighing for the local cartoons

"It's painful just to think about those days," says Nanie Feng Lee. She recalls the situation back then: "We fought those lawsuits for three years, doing nothing but researching the case. But we never wavered in our determination, because we weren't doing it for ourselves, we were doing it so as to right the wrongs done to the field of cartoons and comics in Taiwan."

The lawyer Li Yung-jan stood shoulder to shoulder with Niu Gur and Nanie fighting these lawsuits year after year. Li explains that he didn't know Niu Gur before defending him. "I told him that lawsuits are really a lot of trouble, and that they can drag on for years. He responded that he wasn't scared in the least, and that he wouldn't back down even if it bankrupted him! This moved me, so I immediately agreed to help him." The lawsuits took more than three years. Li says that there were enough subpoenas to have an exhibition of those documents alone. But Heaven rewards those who are righteously persistent, and all 14 suits were dismissed.

Over the course of his lifetime, Niu Gur never put down his pen. Even when he was hospitalized, he would draw. It pained him to see how, as the nation has recently been again flooded with Japanese comics, the older cartoonists stopped drawing and the younger ones could be counted on the fingers of one hand. He wanted to establish a foundation whose sole purpose would be to cultivate domestic cartoonists. Unfortunately, he died before he could realize this dream.

Realizing her husband's dream

Yet within a year of his death, Nanie Feng Lee was able to establish a Niu Gur Cartoon Education Foundation. During its planning stages and first year of formal operation, it has already put on nine touring exhibitions. Apart from selecting some cutting-edge work by Taiwan cartoonists, the foundation has also invited mainland cartoonists to participate in the exhibitions as well. At these shows, you can actually find working cartoonists putting pen to paper. These exhibitions allow people to become acquainted with unfamiliar cartoonists and their work. In the mainland Feng arranged for showings at highly prominent exhibition halls, and invited Tsai Tung-chao, Lin Chin, Wang Liu, Tseng Hui-chuan, Wang Ping, Cheng Ching, Kuo Song-hsiung and other Taiwanese cartoonists to attend so that people on the mainland could have a rare glimpse at how these artists combine typical cartoon images with more realistic elements.

Apart from organizing exhibitions, the foundation also contacts local communities about having cartoonists draw cute maps for tourists. Feng has also republished works by Niu Gur and has had great success in selling the PRC rights for Niu Gur's works to mainland publishers. Except for some small grants from the government, most of the money needed to run the foundation has come from commemorative editions of the cartoonist's work sold at the touring exhibitions, as well as from the movie and television rights to his novel Rivalry in a Gambling Country. Feng hopes she can work with publishers or entrepreneurs to help the Foundation grow stronger and stronger. She hopes it will continue to hold several exhibitions a year as well as offer classes, thereby improving the field of comics in Taiwan and fulfilling Niu Gur's wish.

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The talented and creative Niu Gur was entirely self-taught, but he produced countless works in his lifetime. (photo by Chen Ping-hsun)

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"Uncle Niu the Guerilla Fighter" was Niu Gur's most memorable and popular comic strip.

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After Niu Gur became famous, contracts for new work poured in. In this strip, featuring a character called Yang Ching-pang, Niu Gur satirized people who had only a smattering of English but pretentiously sprinkled their speech with foreign expressions.

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"Old Youtiao" (Oil Stick) often made light of social phenomena, and the Miss China contest, one of the most watched events of that era, was no exception.

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Niu Gur and his wife came from very different backgrounds, and their wedding-with then Control Yuan President Yu You-jen (center) as one of the witnesses-caused a stir.

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Niu Gur's wife says to his memorial photo: "Old Niu, you would never have guessed that your work is going to be exhibited in mainland China!" (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

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Niu Gur and his wife (the couple at center) worked together and played together. They enjoyed hunting in the mountains, here shown accompanied by the well-known martial arts novelists Wo Lung Sheng and Sima Ling.

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Niu Gur referred to his wife as "the opposition party," yet, despite their frequent bickering, they grew closer over time. For a time "Sister-in-law Niu," as she is known among her friends, became addicted to mahjong. Once, on her birthday, she returned home from her gambling to find this cartoon her husband drew for her, which was infuriating and hilarious at the same time.

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Niu Gur loved satire. This cartoon is a classic of his style, making fun of the habit of self-styled connoisseurs who stamp paintings with their own name chops. The names on the chops in this image, however, are all amusingly absurd.

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Niu Gur was able to make the most of the subtlety of Chinese written characters. This cartoon, in which the characters can be read counterclockwise starting at any point and still make sense, is the best selling of all reproductions of Niu Gur's illustrations.

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Though Niu Gur had only half a year of education in classical Chinese, he was able to compose penetrating poetry. This work sharply criticizes show-off literati.

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Niu Gur also loved mahjong, and drew many cartoons drawing on the interactions of people playing this game. What mahjong fan wouldn't want to collect one of these?

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Niu Gur not only loved and drew cartoons, but taught others with no thought of recompense. His dream was that a "native" form of comic illustration would flourish.

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These drawings of Uncle Niu at various angles show the care that went into the drawing of Niu Gur's characters. They are also useful for aspiring cartoonists to study.

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Niu Gur was outspoken on behalf of local comics, which were suppressed for a time. The final victory was won only after a 14-year struggle. After Niu Gur's death, Liu Hsing-chin, an admirer, drew this cartoon in commemoration.