What Are Some Promising Chinese Comics Worth Following in 2025?
This article is reposted with authorization from “Donghua Xueshu Ba (Anime Academic趴)”
2025 was a year of ups and downs for the Chinese comics market: there were industry changes that chilled both creators and readers, but also the return of various beloved classic works that brought back memories.
As the saying goes, one generation will grow old, but someone is always young. As long as the comics industry still exists, there will always be new creators and new works breaking through. Of the domestic comics new releases we rounduped last year, three already have new collected volumes; some works, sadly, were ended;
This year, following tradition, we're once again recommending new domestic comics serialized on major platforms between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025!
This year we recommend 19 works in total: 12 on Bilibili Comics, 6 on Tencent Comics, and one on Bada Comics. In terms of both quantity and quality, this year's new releases are more diverse in genre, and their average quality is stronger!
Since so many works are involved, I won't go into the details of each story, and will only briefly introduce the highlights of each work and the authors' characteristics (Friends who know me are well aware that once I start talking comics in detail, there's no finishing in under a few thousand words, haha). More in-depth analysis will be covered in dedicated articles, which we'll discuss in detail then.
01 Bilibili Comics
First, let's start with Bilibili Comics. Since the exodus of Tencent Comics' top brass and the reforms to page rates, Bilibili Comics has seemingly become the last pure land for original Chinese comics. Not only has it opened a dedicated 【Comic Artists】 section for newcomers, the 【Yaoqi Village】 competition inherited from U17 is also in full swing. And more new works are being serialized on this platform.
Buddy's return work after several years away, it wins people over with a heartwarming, beautiful art style and delicate, touching emotional portrayal, paired with the rarely seen Hanfu theme. Works on traditional culture themes like this are truly rare in today's domestic comics market. Buddy came up with the idea after giving birth: she noticed that the first garment nurses put on newborns was a cross-collared design resembling ancient costume. As a tailoring enthusiast, Buddy began trying to make similar garments, and started getting into Hanfu and learning related knowledge.
And so “White Begonia” was born. Stitch by stitch, silks and satins are turned into garments; Hanfu threads the main plotline together, and it is also a story about two young girls growing up.
“Zhu Lian,” a Tang dynasty girl raised from childhood by her grandmother's tailoring, and “Bai Tang,” a modern girl bearing the weight of her lawyer mother's expectations. Through a time slip, the Tang dynasty girl arrives in the present day, and by a stroke of luck the two join a Hanfu club together. The story unfolds from there.
Beyond the beautiful mutual affection between the two girls, another major highlight is how the eras they come from and their original families shaped two very different personalities, and how they interact — especially the way each learns from the other and grows, which is such a wonderful thing. Combined with Buddy's unique sense of color, the entire work seems bathed in a Buddha's halo, absolutely radiant.
Just how outstanding is this work? In less than a year it swept the 22nd Golden Dragon Award and a spot among the China Animation Association's Top Ten Recommended Comics of the Year — that says it all. What's more, the collected volume is about to be released, so look forward to it.
The official Elden Ring comic, hugely popular overseas, turns out to be by a pair of twins! Their new work tells a horror-thriller adventure story set in a city where temperatures reach 52 degrees. Taking extreme heat as its entry point, the extreme climate anomaly stirs unknown creatures into motion, constructing a disaster world that is both real and illusory.
The new work recommended here is called “Extreme Heat Evolution.” It not only won the Gold Award in the Simplified Chinese division of the 1st KADOKAWA International Original Webcomic Competition, but also took Silver in the Japan translated-publication award.
Unlike typical post-apocalyptic works, this one doesn't spend large amounts of exposition on the worldbuilding; instead it follows the protagonists directly into this disaster world, feeling things out bit by bit and uncovering the world's truths little by little. Shoujiquan's atmosphere-building in this work is masterful: the dark-orange color palette and the apocalypse's high heat complement each other perfectly; and the monster designs are refreshingly original — Shoujiquan believes monster design is inseparable from the worldbuilding, the characters, and the theme: first settle on the characters and the theme, then derive the monster traits the story needs.
Also, this work's (presumed) female lead is neither a saintly Madonna nor any other flat archetype; she is a selfish, ruthless-yet-vivid character living under the apocalypse. Though it may be controversial, I think this is a very rare kind of female character in domestic comics.
A new work by CuZn, lead artist of the completed Bilibili Comics hit “Villain Initialization”: “The Writer Is Living on the Edge Today Too,” winner of the Gold Award in the Simplified Chinese division of the 2nd KADOKAWA International Original Webcomic Competition. It only began serializing officially on Bilibili Comics on September 29.
The story follows Yi Min, a chronic procrastinator of a writer who, to push himself to finish his work, hires a supervisor. However, this supervisor turns out to be a cold-blooded killer known as “Anonymous”... This time, what Yi Min faces isn't just deadline pressure but a life-or-death challenge.
The work carries on Cuzn's consistently high-level paneling language, while the coloring and character work are as excellent as ever. Thematically it pairs a deadline-missing writer with a professional killer for maximum contrast, magnifying the contradiction of “deadline = death line”; and the way each of them grows in their own profession thanks to the other's efforts — a mutual salvation friendship — is a throwback to Villain Initialization.
Only 9 chapters in so far, but the two leads are already well established and the plot is hitting its stride. Training a writer like you'd train a killer is great fun — looking forward to what comes next.
In fact, both of these are flagship titles for “KadoComi (KADOCOMI), KADOKAWA's comics platform,” launched as the first homepage run by an overseas subsidiary: the “Kadokawa Qingyu AOH Editorial Department.” There's also another work, BIU's “The Forest of Xiao Yu.”
A novel pairing of a grumpy Chinese Daoist priest and a scatterbrained European vampire — a collision between Chinese Daoist magic and Western supernatural powers!
Beyond the exotic Daoist spells and the vampire's mysterious superpowers, the big draw is the irresistible dynamic between the two leads. Both protagonists are vivid and memorable, and a single small case is enough to render their personalities fully three-dimensional for the reader.
The author goes by “Wang Wu,” but readers familiar with domestic comics will recognize at a glance that this is actually GXM, lead artist of “The Simulator of Lu Bu's Life,” under a new pseudonym. Since the author doesn't want to admit it, let's just treat them as another artist from the same studio.
“The Nameless Dao” carries on the author's consistently high-level artwork, and some of the full-spread close-ups are even more striking. From the prologue we can faintly guess that this muddled little Daoist and the hot-blooded vampire may well be linked across past and present lives, and the current main storyline centers on the vampire recovering his memories, filling out the worldview clue by clue as he searches — the pacing of the whole story is handled flawlessly. An opening sequence of nearly show-off set pieces seems to foreshadow where the story is ultimately headed, and the ongoing chapters keep peeling away layers, slowly unveiling the story behind it.
A Qing-palace time-travel mystery comic, rare in today's market — and excellent source material for a future screen adaptation! In the author's own words: palace intrigue dramas are the princess fairy tales best suited to the Chinese constitution! You can tell how much the author loves palace dramas.
The work's research into Qing court detail is meticulous — from court institutions to objects and costumes — giving readers stronger immersion and reinforcing the story's realism. Using a corpse sealed beneath the ice as its point of entry, the work slowly lifts the fog hanging over the deep palace. The schemes and duels of wits among the palace's various factions are where the essence lies.
Although the female lead is a time traveler, this is no overpowered-cheat story; step by step, with genuine feeling, she wins over a circle of “sisters” within the deep palace. The relationships among each of the imperial consorts are portrayed with great delicacy, very much in the feel of a romance novel, while also making readers feel that every woman in the palace is a living, breathing person.
This delicacy marks a big step up from the author's two previous works, “Boredom Kills” and “Useless Special Agent.” And precisely because the opening is slow to heat up, the author serialized daily for 14 straight days, spending a great deal of time early on to establish the whole work's tone, with the story properly entering its climax from chapter 14. I think that kind of courage is truly rare in today's restless comics market.
Looking even more forward to what comes next.
The latest collaboration between Tanzinya, former lead artist of “Gate of the Mystic Realm,” and GK Studio's Xingyun — superb artwork plus a reliably outputting imagination: how could such a powerhouse pairing not be great?
On the surface, “Naya's Game” is a story about “doppelgängers” (that concept really was trending for a while). In fact, we can read it as a work fusing Cthulhu mythos with survival-suspense themes — a genre Xingyun handles with practiced ease. What's more, this work shares character crossovers with “The Third Hour Past Noon” from the same studio, and later on it will most likely merge into a shared universe with “Chuan Wu.”
The story follows delivery driver Bu Ziwei as he gets caught up in mysterious incidents, step by step unmasking the doppelgänger ghouls, and finally, at a critical moment, becoming the “Shadow God's Walker” (a seriously cool delivery-armor suit) as he fights back against evil beings. Real Guangdong place names and locations appear, letting Guangdong readers instantly map the story onto real-world coordinates — proof of Tanzinya's deep skill. By the way, this work's lighting and shadow work is truly exceptional, worth savoring closely.
We have our own horror cruise ship story now too. But rather than a time loop, the content focuses more on struggles between different characters across parallel universes. The narrative pace is remarkably tight, the art clean and never cloying, and the storytelling style carries on Chonglan's trademark flights of fancy. In short: a must-read for suspense fans. (Feng Muzheng's recommendation)
Chonglan's previous work, “404 Files — The World Ends in 30 Seconds,” was an underrated gem. This kind of suspense-mystery work demands painstaking polish of every planted clue, and this new work isn't the usual loop题材 — sorry, isn't the usual loop setup, and it's slow to warm up due to its art style. But from chapter 13 we learn that the protagonist team may well be trapped in an 【island loop】 — no more spoilers, go read the work yourselves!
I've been a devoted fan of Djade ever since “Shen Ze” and “Spider Silk.” Djade excels at using irregular speech bubbles and muted color palettes to craft an atmosphere of exquisite tension and emotion, drawing readers in until they can't pull away.
The title “Butterfly Trap” immediately suggests the butterfly effect — and indeed, the show's fascinatingly clever premise is that the protagonist has an APP that lets him travel back to any point within the past ten years; each time he travels back and the two leads' actions can drastically change their current timeline, the protagonist returns to a new point ten years later. The whole story is wonderfully labyrinthine — each change of node affects the final timeline, and this tangled, multi-strand narrative really needs to be laid out once the work is complete.
The protagonist Ling Feng's resilience — “even if utterly destroyed, I can rebuild” — is one of the key factors driving the plot forward. The firm conviction that “there is something I can change, so I will go change it” is another engine propelling him onward.
Looking forward to how the plot develops in the end.
A new work by the author of “Princess Wars,” “She Will Tame Heroes” is a big-female-lead harem battle (reverse harem?) comic, telling the story of the reborn wicked woman Martina, who seeks to protect her daughter and avenge the misery of her previous life. After rebirth, she must tame all manner of future heroes — a comic fusing a sword-and-magic Western fantasy world with court intrigue.
One highlight is that every hero who appears has his own personal charm, with different classes and different personalities — and it's a raising/development system. Once you know their past and present lives, these character reversals greatly heighten the dramatic tension.
With so many kinds of handsome men, how could you not love it?
The only yuri work in this year's recommendations, centered on the psychological duel between wealthy heiress Han Kexin and casino owner Mu Mingyi. Mu Mingyi manipulates the table with her card skills, her words radiating oppression (e.g. “Right now I want to see you crawl on your knees to my feet”), while Han Kexin sinks ever deeper into the gambling trap and emotional snare the other has designed.
By the way, the secondary couple progresses faster than the main one, so the secondary couple also generates more buzz — people really do love the pink-haired one's antics! I dare not say too much; readers who like this kind of comic should savor it for themselves!
The only debut work in this year's recommendations — author Niu Asi began serializing it on Bilibili Comics' 【Comic Artists】 section on October 26, 2025. It is also the author's first work published on a public platform.
The work has a very strong Chinese folk ghost-and-monster flavor, and it's very “rural.” The whole work exudes a rich humanistic atmosphere.
The rural laborers within aren't just well-researched in costume — their mannerisms and behavior are very authentically Chinese, and the monster designs are genuinely unusual; at least I've never seen this type on the market. The whole story hasn't fully unfolded yet, but the chapters already published are enough to show this work's potential.
One of 2025's most viral absurdist comics. Author Feiyu Pengpeng's painstakingly crafted original comic “You're All NPCs!” drew too little attention, with nobody reading it. So while updating his social media, the author also drew some new adaptations of classical Chinese poetry.
Unexpectedly, this unplanned “joke comic” blew up by combining classical poetry with comedic battle scenes, paired with exaggerated, goofy action and meme-worthy titles; readers jokingly call it “reciting poetry with your fists.”
I have to say, in today's age of fragmented attention, any comic can genuinely go viral overnight as long as it finds the right audience, the right platform, and the right creative direction. Of course, before opportunity falls from the sky, you need your own solid skills to be able to catch it. Feiyu Pengpeng had in fact been serializing “Shadow Spirit Chronicles” on Tencent Comics as far back as 2020.
So, in this era of comics' decline, can the social-media model offer comic artists a new direction? Let's wait and see!
02 Tencent Comics
Tencent Comics was once the largest soil for original Chinese comics, but for various reasons its glory days are gone. Still, a dead camel is bigger than a horse, and this year there were still impressive new works serializing on the Tencent platform.
Sometimes you can't help thinking: what is the me in a parallel world like? Is there a version of me who's rich? Would I envy that me — or would she envy me? Maybe this comic will give us an answer: from “Shui Wa” Zhao Yiren comes “Kill My Other-World Self,” in which a meteorite causes the male leads of two worlds to cross over into each other — every time they sleep, they swap into the other's world for a day, over and over.
The comic takes the struggle between the good and evil male leads as its main line, and the dialectic between wealth and poverty as its supporting theme, arguing an eagle-and-chick story: the chick envies the eagle's freedom to soar, while the eagle envies the chick's ability to live safely without risking its life hunting. No one needs to envy anyone; everyone has their own way of living. Gains always come with losses — in pursuing wealth, you will inevitably lose something. (Mo Dengmen's recommendation)
Bindi's favorite new comic of 2025. Given my fondness for the author's previous work “Yuan Mu,” I went in with rose-tinted glasses from the very first chapter, but even so it exceeded my expectations all the way to its ending — I have to marvel at how quickly the author has improved. This medium-length work, serialized from January 14, 2025 to its official completion on December 31, 2025 across 95 chapters, achieved, in my view, an outstanding benchmark for a proper ending within the current domestic comics environment.
The plot wastes no time, and the story's pacing is steady yet full of drama. The back-and-forth battle of wits between good-me and evil-me (the two protagonists from parallel worlds) is the story's highlight, and the strong contrast between the personalities each grew in their different worlds creates tremendous dramatic conflict.
And finally, one reason I have to recommend it: this work is already finished! Completed in just one year of serialization! And the story wraps up satisfyingly, with no botched ending — that alone puts it above 90% of domestic comics. By the way, the little sister really is important!
Bai Xiao's latest masterwork! Adapted from Er Gen's cultivation novel of the same name. It went live on Tencent Comics on October 1, 2025, and even while working on three titles simultaneously, the author maintains weekly updates — sometimes even twice weekly. And the work's quality has consistently been above that of similar novel adaptations.
In this work Bai Xiao attempts to fuse page-comic narrative logic with the pacing advantages of the webcomic format; plot points that would be unnecessary in the novel are expressed through the comic's unique storytelling, making the work impeccable both as a story to read and as art to behold.
The only concern now is Bai Xiao's health. Renowned comic artists from the print-media era hold their work to very high standards — that's why we get to see such brilliant works. Of course, we also hope this work doesn't suffer the same fate as “Glory of the Star Sea” and others, and can see its story through to a proper end.
Led by Xiaoxin, author of “Fox Spirit Matchmaker,” co-created with Bai Xiao, adapted from Ting Ri's novel of the same name, “The Warlock's Handbook.” The work reportedly took two years of preparation, and is serialized without affecting Fox Spirit Matchmaker's update schedule.
The story follows protagonist Ash Heath, who transmigrates into a cult leader — arrested from the very start — but relies on the “Aurora Warlock's Handbook” system to summon the sword maiden Sonia, launching into jailbreaks, otherworld explorations, and cult conspiracies.
So far the adaptation has been done remarkably well, keeping the original's fun setting and ideas. As long as it can finish properly, it will be an excellent work.
A new work from Zhashushi Dede, author of “Girls and Science.” The “world-class” power level appearing right at the start is very much Dede's style, but given the power-scale blowout in the later chapters of Girls and Science, Dede has stated outright this time that the power ceiling has already been set, and the same mistake won't happen again.
This approach of making “emotions” the theme and embodying them as various “giant emotion entities” in combat is very fresh. In particular, the protagonist's unique “rational emotion” serves as a guiding light for the character's whole portrayal. As the protagonist keeps leveling up, the secrets of this emotion world keep being unlocked — that feeling of exploring the world alongside the protagonist is exactly what adventure is! Add in the author's rapidly improving artwork, and this work's future potential is no less than Girls and Science. Very bullish on it!
This is the only BL work on the recommendation list. “I Met Snow in Midsummer” is a gangland story with refined artwork and tremendous dramatic tension — especially suited to readers who love rivals-of-equal-strength dynamics.
The story centers on Ye Tang and Meng Yixing: three years ago, Ye Tang, raised in the slums, fell in love with Meng Yixing, the masked young boss of a gang, only to be used and cast down; three years later, he disguises his identity as a lawyer and reunites with Meng Yixing, and the two begin a push-and-pull of mutual scheming and mutual attraction. Both Ye Tang and Meng Yixing are highly intelligent characters — from deception to exploitation to mutual fulfillment, the plot is full of strategic dueling.
Honestly, with BL works the art style is the first thing you look at, and this work's art is absolutely top-tier. The push-and-pull between the two also has plenty of shipping chemistry — readers who like this type of comic can dive right in.
“Edict: Hunt the Gods” is a xuanhuan comic set in a world where “humanity's negative emotions pollute the gods, causing deities to fall and run amok.” It tells of a sorcerer organization that establishes a “Deity Hunting Committee” to fight against polluted gods descending to possess humans. The setting is unique, blending Eastern mysticism with modern fantasy elements.
Put simply: the protagonist was once a fairly formidable deity, but due to certain events in the past, he lives dependently alongside a century-old Daoist known as “Yeshu,” the two of them working gigs for the Deity Hunting Committee to make money. What's especially fun is how corporate methods of exploiting workers are turned into gags — things like social insurance benefits and outsourced staff get mercilessly mocked. Even gods can't beat poverty!
Author Chen Jieyi's two previous works, “The Capturer General of the Great Tang” and “Hui Nan Tian,” were both underappreciated gems, so we have every reason to believe this work will also be one that can be seen through to a proper ending. 03
To be honest, I don't use this platform much, and there aren't that many quality works on it, though it does hold some competitions each year, and there's one worth keeping an eye on: Jiemoshu's “Tianshi Fuling”.
“Tianshi Fuling” centers on a suspense-horror style: the protagonist uses his yin-yang eye abilities to intervene in life-and-death matters, running a Celestial Master agency that solves supernatural cases. The work fuses urban legends with traditional zhiguai elements, positioned as a premium domestic comic you can “read ad-free to your heart's content.”
The author, Jiemoshu, was the lead artist on the later Sea God Island arc of the first Douluo Dalu — the serializing stamina forged under that earlier intense pressure is on full display in this new work.
At present, the work basically follows a one-arc-one-problem structure. This episodic-drama format allows for a longer serialization, and each story's quality depends on its subject and angle, giving this comic boundless future possibilities. From the chapters updated so far, nearly every arc has been well done — beyond showcasing dazzling Daoist spell duels, it explores human good and evil and social issues. Balancing battle spectacle with genuine depth, it's a very fine work.
By the way, this work forms an iQIYI Bada summer new-release lineup together with “Xu Ling,” “The Rules of Hunting the Immortal Kings,” and “The Sinless World.”
04 Wrap-up
Finally, a brief summary: the new serialized works of 2025 certainly go beyond those listed above — many excellent works failed to be seen. And there's an interesting phenomenon this year: the strongest new works are still being made by seasoned veteran creators, while works by pure newcomers are rarely seen.
Another characteristic is the clear increase in works about Daoist magic and in the suspense-mystery genre, and the quality of novel adaptations is getting more and more competitive. All in all, 2025 was a steady upward trend in terms of new comics. I hope every work here can serialize properly to its ending, release collected volumes, and even get screen adaptations.
Indeed, at the very start of 2026, two highly promising new works have already begun serializing: Kuizi's “The Man Who Fell From Beyond the Sky Is No Immortal” and Zhou Liefen & Hera's “This Is a Online Loan Your Summon Beast Applied For.” We'll talk about those in more detail next year.
Only through the passing of the torch can domestic comics keep getting better and better.