2 posts tagged with "Chinese comics"

“Readers hoped to see richer, more dimensional character development, while the creators were more focused on fleshing out a complex and diverse IP worldview.”

After eight years of serialization, Lanxi Zhen, written by MTJJ and primarily illustrated by Sun Gua, has finally come to an end.

As one of the rare original commercial serialized comics in China that still enjoys a high level of discussion, the conclusion of Lanxi Zhen has drawn considerable attention. However, unlike the nearly unanimous acclaim for The Legend of Luo Xiaohei TV series and its first feature film, the comic's ending sparked enormous controversy — even triggering, in turn, criticism of the animated content.

Some complain the ending was rushed, some question whether the protagonist's characterization fell apart, while others insist this is an above-average work whose reputation slipped simply because audiences projected overly high expectations onto it.

Was this eight-year journey a regrettable “botched ending,” or is there something deeper at play?

Before labeling Lanxi Zhen, let us set aside our judgments of the characters for a moment, return to that world of spirits, and re-examine the positioning and mission of this work.

01 A Worldview Gradually Completed​

Unlike many works that present a complete setting from the moment of debut, the worldview of Luo Xiaohei was gradually filled in as the series developed. The entire series takes “the relationship between humans and spirits” as its main thread, with “the establishment of the Guild” and “The Gate of All Beings” as landmark milestones, exploring how the human-spirit relationship changed across different periods and how the two could coexist.

Looking back at the release timeline of the series, we can observe the whole process of construction of the Luo Xiaohei world:

From 2011 to 2017, the TV series The Legend of Luo Xiaohei daily-life arc (episodes 1-27) kept updating, moving readers with its warm, healing style. At this stage, the work focused on specific characters and compact, punchy storytelling; the building of the worldview took a back seat, conveyed only briefly through fragmentary narration — for example, in episode 13, “Psionic Power,” through Agen's words, it first introduced basic settings such as “spirits,” “yokai/spirits,” and “psionic spaces.”

What truly made the world grand and dimensional was the comic Lanxi Zhen, which began serialization in 2018. Although before the 2019 release of the feature film The Legend of Luo Xiaohei 1, the comic still centered on warm slice-of-life storytelling, the author was already consciously adding to the setting — e.g., the term “Six Major Disciplines” first appears in chapter 10, and chapter 18 establishes “when psionic essence dissipates, one returns to nature” and “there is no bringing the dead back to life.”

As the plot progressed, Lanxi Zhen gradually revealed its grand vision: with Laojun, master of all Six Disciplines, and Qingning, a prodigy of the healing discipline, as protagonists, the comic naturally introduced new concepts such as souls, death spirits, and spirit-seeking through their lessons and practice, filling in the background of the “Six Disciplines” and “Five Elements” that the TV series could not fully display, and systematically explaining the underlying setting of “spirits.”

At the same time, lines like “humans' ancestors were also spirits” and “spirits believe in the fixed-species doctrine... all living things today evolved and diversified from the ancient spirit race” pushed the connection between humans and spirits back to a more remote primordial era, strengthening the world's credibility.

Perhaps because the comic had laid the groundwork, in the subsequently updated TV series The Gate of All Beings arc (episodes 28-40) and the 2025 feature film The Legend of Luo Xiaohei 2, the creators no longer explained the underlying logic of spirits and yokai, but directly presented how the world operates.

Unlike the TV series and films, which focus on current events, Lanxi Zhen places greater emphasis on building the worldview. Its core mission has two parts: one is to systematically output the world's settings, and the other is to complete a timeline spanning a hundred years. This includes introducing the origin of the spirits' Guild and its social background, and explaining the reasons behind important TV-series events such as Laojun refusing to leave his mountain and Fairy Qingning's passing. One could say that Lanxi Zhen's worldview groundwork laid the foundation for the animated storyline to fully flex its muscles.

On the other hand, Lanxi Zhen's main storyline spans a full 392 years, and such an enormous time span means an extremely heavy narrative burden — its feel was destined not to be as light and breezy as the animation. To accomplish the ambition of “building a world” within limited space, the author sacrificed, to a certain degree, the delicate carving of characters at the micro level.

The particularity of Lanxi Zhen is thus evident: if you only enjoy Xiaohei's slice-of-life storytelling, beautiful fight scenes, and animation, the TV series and feature films are more than enough; but if you want a systematic understanding of the worldview, Lanxi Zhen is a must-read. And a complete, detailed, and credible worldview is also of great significance to the development of the entire Luo Xiaohei series.

02 Why Do Modern People Love Luo Xiaohei?​

The prevalence of fan-made derivative works makes it clear that the construction of the Luo Xiaohei world is a success. As the Luo Xiaohei IP's worldview has been continuously built and refined, the ways audiences consume it have also changed.

Before the TV series and the first feature film were released, Luo Xiaohei was still in the IP development stage. Referring to Hiroki Azuma's classification of anime consumption modes in Otaku: Japan's Database Animals (Animalized Postmodernity), the audience at that stage was in the transition from consuming small narratives to consuming grand narratives — that is, they were moved by the adorable Xiaohei, the stoic Wuxian, and the warm, healing stories. At that time, fan works were mostly fan art and fan comics of the main cast, and the objects of consumption were still the specific characters and storylines created by the author.

As Lanxi Zhen filled in the worldview, the audience's attention began to extend from the surface-level “story” and “character design” to the “worldview” behind the story, showing a tendency toward “worldview consumption.” In the era of the second film, a series of OC posters set against the Luo Xiaohei worldview appeared in fan communities; by then the Luo Xiaohei IP had been built into a relatively internally consistent world, and audiences were no longer satisfied with merely watching Xiaohei's story — they tried to construct their own identities within that psionic system.

At the same time, The Gate of All Beings arc and the second film also showed a tendency toward “database consumption.” A large number of exquisitely designed characters flash by without their stories or backgrounds being explained, yet they provide the audience with a “database” that can be searched and mined.

But unlike the database consumption described by Hiroki Azuma, which purely pursues combinations of “moe elements,” the character database in the Luo Xiaohei series often serves to supplement the worldview, aiming to prove the authenticity and vastness of this world where humans and spirits coexist.

This may be related to the production team's unique aesthetic orientation and creative habits: rather than precise control over narrative and script, they are more immersed in the design of visual language — creating rich character designs, polishing scenes with a strong sense of everyday life, and designing a logically self-consistent system of civilization. In this process, the priorities of creation shifted as well: the self-consistency of the worldview took precedence, to a certain extent, over the shaping of specific characters, resulting in a large and diverse cast and a narrative approach that resembles “decentralization.”

As a result, some viewers jokingly called the TV series “The Legend of Agen,” the first film “The Legend of Wuxian,” and the second film “The Legend of Luye,” while the protagonist Xiaohei seemed more like a point-of-view character used to string together the various characters with no or only shallow connections under the grand worldview.

On one hand, this narrative strategy makes key information overly scattered, burdening newcomers and casual viewers. To fully understand a character's story, one has to dig through the creators' Weibo, art books, the TV series, and the comic. On the other hand, it has also made the work's reputation mixed: supporters love this “everyone has a story” sense of aliveness; detractors feel the characters appear too chaotically and abruptly, weakening the narrative tension.

Setting aside visual factors like art style and design, why does this fictional world of spirits hold such powerful appeal?

From an IP perspective, the charm of the Luo Xiaohei worldview comes from its clearly layered, rigorously logical “psionic” settings. Through the explicit Six Disciplines of abilities, the promotion path of “becoming an immortal, attaining godhood,” and organizations of spirit forces such as the Guild, the creators have provided fans with a clear, easy-to-identify-with set of rules, making it easier for fans to project themselves into it.

Luo Xiaohei's breakout popularity lies even more in its gentle, understated narrative style. As one netizen joked about Luo Xiaohei's characters, “so utterly unremarkable, and so reassuring” — this series has constructed a warm, mutually respectful, almost zero-social-burden spirit society that fits modern people's pursuit of and longing for freedom and equality, becoming a spiritual utopia where some people rest their hearts.

How does spirit society differ from human society?

Borrowing Fei Xiaotong's view in The Institution of Reproduction: in human society, the family, as the smallest social unit, was fundamentally established to satisfy the need for the human species to continue (i.e., the need for reproduction). To ensure newborn individuals could survive smoothly within the social system, society established the institution of marriage, helping human infants complete the long process of “socialization” through “dual-parent nurturing,” while introducing inheritance systems to ensure the effective transfer of resources and power across generations.

Although these institutions guaranteed the stability of the social structure, over the course of history they gradually merged with economic and power orders, forming the present social system dominated by male and patriarchal power. Gender discrimination, generational divides, and class oppression are often rationalized in the name of “family responsibility” or “social expectations,” becoming structural burdens modern people find hard to shake off.

In spirit society, by contrast, the setting that spirits gather psionic essence to live and cannot reproduce fundamentally deconstructs the responsibilities and burdens brought by family. Without the need for reproduction, there is no gendered division of labor or inheritance pressure arising from it. Spirits can even freely choose their gender according to individual will, confining gender difference to the visual level, no longer carrying substantive biological or sociological distinctions.

Moreover, since spirits have extremely long lifespans and powerful abilities, they do not rely on class or strong organizations to obtain resources for survival. The way spirits get along resembles Laozi's “small state, few people,” where “people grow old and die without visiting one another.” Spirit organizations form mainly through geographic ties and master-disciple lineages.

But even when born in the same region, spirits do not form guardianship responsibilities or nurturing obligations based on order of birth; instead, like siblings, they treat each other as equals. Taking a master is usually a voluntary act as well — one may form deep bonds over shared interests, or, like Xuanli, simply take a master for the sake of cultivation, without needing to form overly deep emotional ties.

​“Spirits are infinitely varied and can only be judged as individuals”(chapter 48) — this immense degree of choice and autonomy, compared with the unchosen bonds of blood, better fits modern people's desire for freedom and self-determination.

Such a worldview also more easily gives rise to “big heroine characters” like Luye. In realist narratives, a female character's charm often comes from her difficult breakout through the cracks of patriarchy and male power; but in spirit society, the systemic resistance faced by female spirits is minimized.

So when the screenwriter shapes these characters, she need not consider the reproductive anxieties and family responsibilities human women so often face, staying far from the resulting gender stereotypes of being considerate, gentle and cute, or selflessly devoted, allowing the character to explore the world and establish her self purely according to individual will.

This is also part of why some readers placed such high hopes on Qingning. In such a relatively equal world, Qingning could have broken through gender stereotypes and achieved complete personal independence, answering the audience's expectations of an ideal self, an ideal woman — but the work failed to show Qingning's complexity, reducing her to a perfect yet stereotyped “Saint” and “Fairy.”

03 Why Did Lanxi Zhen Spark Controversy?​

In this author's view, the polarization of Lanxi Zhen's reputation is not only because the creative team's shaping abilities were limited, but even more because readers and the author held different expectations and positioning for this work: readers hoped to see more dimensional character development, while the creators focused more on how to flesh out a complex and diverse IP worldview.

From MTJJ's response, we can see the misalignment between the two. This article will mainly use Qingning as an example.

The creative team seems to believe that Qingning's growth was already complete when she followed Naga to the Northern Territories, and that the three hundred years there were merely a deepening of “repetitive and lonely” emotions; but from the readers' perspective, those three hundred years were the process of Qingning transforming from “human” to “immortal” — they should not be glossed over so simply, and deserved to be elaborated in ink.

The readers' doubts are not unfounded. Due to the shift of narrative focus, although Qingning's character arc had taken embryonic form before she left for the Northern Territories, it lacked force. This author will select three key events along Qingning's growth as examples for analysis:

First, traveling alone (chapters 49-60). After taking Laojun as her master, Qingning left Lanxi Town and Laojun's side for the first time, stepping into wider society, initially realizing the complexity of human-spirit relations and pondering the question of her stance on healing. At that time, her understanding of human-spirit relations mostly remained at the emotional level.

Second, attending the hairpin ceremony (chapters 80-84). “When a woman is promised in marriage, she may undergo the hairpin ceremony” — in ancient Han society, women generally underwent the hairpin ceremony before engagement and marriage, symbolizing adulthood. For Qingning, this should have been the turning point where she participated in social decision-making as an independent individual.

Earlier, the creators had designed two small plot points to show the “internal and external troubles” facing Lanxi Town after the war ended — Wuxian seeking Laojun's help on how to govern the calamity (the spirit calamity), and Mr. Zheng wanting to leave Lanxi Town in search of freedom. Qingning's decision at this moment to attend the hairpin ceremony showed her awareness and determination to formally participate in handling these complex conflicts. Yet in the narration, the work simplified the deeper impact of these social changes on Qingning, and by having her reaffirm her feelings for Laojun, contracted the conflict down to the dimension of “love” — the character development had already gone wrong here.

Third, heading to the Northern Territories (chapters 97-105). Yet between the hairpin ceremony and Naga forcing Laojun to hand over Qingning, there is a lack of plot involving Qingning making decisions on her own. Under these circumstances, Qingning suddenly stepping forward to ask Naga for a one-day reprieve, and persuading Laojun to let her go to the Northern Territories, in fact lacks the necessary psychological tempering and accumulation of ability. The qualities she displays — intelligence, strength and resolve, consideration for the greater good — seem innate rather than gradually formed through growth. There is a certain rupture in the character development here as well.

Good plot design should drive the arc of all core characters. During the three hundred years in the Northern Territories, Laojun goes from knowing nothing of love to understanding emotion, and Xuanli goes from impetuous rashness to learning restraint — both overcome their own flaws under the guidance of their goals and achieve clearer self-knowledge.

Qingning alone, apart from the increase in her physical age and cultivation, does not overcome her flaws or improve her self-knowledge in response to the changed environment — the character's growth is missing. This is precisely why readers accuse Qingning of being marginalized and comment that Lanxi Zhen is really “The Legend of Laojun.”

In fact, in this author's view, Qingning should have used her growth in power to break free from the fate of the “healing discipline's” passive sacrifice; she needed to reshape the standards of healing, display her uniqueness and subjectivity, and thereby complete her character arc.

But this process was simplified in the narration. As Laojun's disciple and a born healer, her acts of healing were not merely personal choices — they represented Laojun's stance and were enough to influence the direction of human-spirit relations. Early Qingning could save people through emotional kindness, but the later “Fairy Qingning” ought to have displayed a more rational process of deliberation and weighing, more befitting her identity.

The problem with Qingning's characterization lies partly in the production team's insufficient exploration of Qingning's social identity, and partly in the idealistic tone that permeates the work.

Yet looking across the entire Luo Xiaohei series, the creators seem afraid to give their protagonists “flaws” and “fears,” leaving character growth without internal resistance. Most characters also lack strong desires and goals, presenting a calm, “detached from all four elements” serenity and divinity. While this makes the work warm, it also renders the characters similar and lacking depth, making it hard for readers to resonate deeply.

According to the theory in 45 Master Characters, although Laojun and Qingning both belong to the “Savior” archetype, Laojun still has a transformation from “Hermit” to “Messiah,” whereas Qingning's positioning wavers among “Maiden, Savior, and Nurturer”: she combines the strengths of these archetypes (optimistic, powerful, and innately altruistic) but loses the predicaments these archetypes must face:

As a “Maiden,” she lacks the process of moving from naive dependence to strong independence; as a “Nurturer,” her devotion seems effortless — she is neither hurt by over-giving, nor shaken in her personality or values by choosing not to heal someone.

Even if a character's core is kindness and resilience, when facing certain losses of control they should still go through the shift from “wavering in the loss of control” to “establishing values.” Qingning lacks such a transformation, and thus lacks the process of metamorphosis from “maiden” to “immortal,” seeming more like a “sage” born with all knowledge and in no need of growth.

In building character relationships, characters should establish multidimensional personalities through mutual attraction and repulsion. The thinness and absence of Qingning's social relationships render her personality one-dimensional. By comparison, the most fully realized character in the entire series should be Fengxi from the first film: he has tenderness and kindness toward his own kind, and also cruelty in disregarding human lives;

he has the boldness and decisiveness of a leader of the exiled island group, yet hesitates and agonizes when seizing Xiaohei's domain; he has the calm and meticulousness of a planner, and also the madness and finality of scattering his spirit.

Perhaps precisely because Fengxi is a villain, the creators dared to give him intense flaws and conflicts. By contrast, positive characters like Wuxian and Xiaohei inevitably become caricatured due to the lack of internal antagonistic design.

The problem of characterization is also related to medium. The production team is better at shaping characters through audiovisual language, but comics can only convey information and emotion through static panels and dialogue; if the relationship between image and text is not handled well, emotion easily loses force in transmission. Films, with their tight pacing, emphasize narrative and character development, requiring characters to have clear desires and obstacles. The comic and TV series, with their slower pace and positioning leaning toward warmth and memes, tend to prioritize worldbuilding over deep exploration of characters.

04 Lanxi Zhen: A Dignified Farewell​

Returning to the IP universe: as a prequel, Lanxi Zhen has indeed completed its mission for this stage. It not only outlines the Guild's development, but also explains the distribution of spirit forces in the Guild's founding period, essentially completing the construction of the worldview and the connection of the timeline, providing background support for the feature films and the TV series.

While systematically outputting the “psionic settings,” it also constructed a utopian spirit society free of blood ties and kinship ethics, offering a spiritual haven for modern people yearning for freedom and equality.

The many controversies Lanxi Zhen faced also expose the creative team's shortcomings in long-form work: scattered narrative focus, incomplete character arcs, and insufficient character complexity. This may be related to the team's creative habits: they seem better at everyday storytelling than at grand, complex narratives.

Considering the toll that eight years of serialization took on the creators' energy, ending here is already a sincere and dignified account.

But judging from The Gate of All Beings arc, Hanmuchunhua clearly wants to explore the deeper proposition of “human-spirit coexistence.” Deepening the theme inevitably raises higher demands for character development. According to official announcements, the pre-school arc of The Legend of Luo Xiaohei will be serialized in the second half of this year, and the comic Sword Saint Wuxian will meet readers in a few years.

We look forward to Hanmuchunhua continuing to improve and bringing more excellent works in the future.

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.