Of his popular comic strips, Chu Teh-yung says—"I think my readers identify with my illustrations of the conflict between the two sexes."
"It's ridiculous for people to think I'm like them," says Chu Teh-yung (朱德庸). And at first meeting, he really is nothing like his tart and bitter-tempered comic strip characters. The chain-smoking, thirty-one-year-old cartoonist trips over his words, blushes easily, and coos to the four fat Persian cats that hover around his feet. Chu is the creator of "Double Big Guns" (Shuang Hsiang Pao, 雙響炮) and "Wayward Lovers" (Chu Liu Chu, 醋溜族).
Both newspaper strips are extremely popular in Taiwan. "Double Big Guns," which first ran in the China Times in 1985, is Taiwan's longest running strip. It is now daily fare for the 400,000 readers of China Times Express. "Wayward Lovers" is carried by the China Times, which has more than 1.4 million readers.
"Double Big Guns" revolves around the domestic life of a couple in their sixties, a willful and sharp-tongued wife and her milksop husband. She is bug-eyed and pear-shaped, and he is spindly, bespectacled, and balding. The situations are predominantly slapstick, and stereotypical of domestic-problem strips.
The wife often wields the familiar rolling pin. She frequently boots her husband out of the house, throws things, including daggers, at him, and verbally and physically abuses him. And she cows him into showing her some affection. The husband loves to drink and look at pretty women. And although the wife appears to be the more dominant of the two, he manages to score a few triumphs. His flattery reduces her to mush, and his rare comebacks leave her stumped and speechless.
The humor in "Double Big Guns" is derisive and downright mean. In one strip, she rewards him with drink. "You are the gentlest woman," he says, and she pours him a drink. "You are the sexiest," and he gets yet another drink. Glasses begin to collect at his side of the table. "You are the prettiest," he says. The last panel shows the couple slumped on the table, she with hearts dancing over her head, and he happily drunk, his thoughts saying, "We all know what we want."
Mother-in-law and grownup son make the occasional appearance. In one scene, the couple are sitting on the couch, he reading a newspaper, and she a book. Their son sits between them. ''I'll tell you a secret," she says to the son. "If it weren't for you, I would have left your father a long time ago." And then the husband tells the son, ''I'll let you in on a secret, too. If your mother hadn't been pregnant with you, I would have never married her."
The characters do not have names. The husband addresses his wife with the polite form tai tai (wife) or the more familiar lao po (old lady). But to others, he refers to her as that damned old hag. To his face, she calls him lao kong (old man), wretch, or bastard, depending on her mood.
"I don't have faith in love or marriage," says Chu. But he is also careful to point out that "Double Big Guns" is not drawn from his own marriage. He has been married for two years, and has a baby son. "The human character is ugly," he says. "And whatever I draw, I draw from that perspective. As I see it, the purpose of cartoons is to portray the meanness of people." The strips have been compiled into three albums, and together have sold a total of 350,000 copies.
Chu began putting pen to paper at the age of four. He and an older brother entertained each other by drawing. Inspired by television programs, they would sketch swordsmen, cowboys, and soldiers. The brothers especially liked World War II series. "We would choose sides," he says. "Then we would carry out the battle on paper. Whoever drew the best weapons won."
He gives his father much of the credit for encouraging the artist in him. Chu says, "My father wasn't like most parents. He did not stop me from drawing. He would buy my art supplies and look over my work. My older brother was better than I was, but he was more interested in school." To this day, father and son still collaborate. Chu does the line drawings for his strips, and his father colors them in.
People have remained his favorite subjects, and he says he never thought of making a career out of drawing comic strips until "Double Big Guns" became a success. He had majored in film at the World Junior College of Journalism in Taipei, and had planned to go abroad for advanced study as soon as he finished his two-year compulsory military service. From time to time, he would satirize movies for campus publications just to earn pocket money. A few months before graduation in 1983, he entered a comic strip serial in a cartoon competition sponsored by the daily, Min Sheng Pao. It was about illegal street vendors and their tricks in outwitting the police. He won fourth prize. "I did it for fun," he says, but his serial nevertheless attracted the attention of the newspapers.
While in the army, Chu was sent off to the island of Matsu, an important military outpost lying between mainland China's Fukien province and Taiwan proper. It was a few months before his service ended that he began to draw for the China Times. That was the beginning of "Double Big Guns." He knew that with an old, married couple, it would be difficult to run out of ideas. He originally entitled the strip, "He and She," completing a total of a hundred four-panel strips.
"I did many of them under the blanket, holding a flashlight in my left hand," he says. And to evade the military censors who randomly checked all of the soldiers' incoming and outgoing mail, he would cut up the four panels, and mail them one by one to his father. It was not until he returned to Taipei in the summer of 1985 that he realized how well the strip was being received.
Boosted by this unexpected success, he accepted an offer to draw for the China Times, and shelved his plans to study abroad. He worked as a news illustrator and continued to do the strip. Then in 1989, he created "Wayward Lovers." "I wanted to draw people who were completely different from the old couple," he says.
"Wayward Lovers" lampoons "single nobles," as Taiwan's unmarried yuppies are called. The strip's main characters are two lovers, who continuously find fault in and taunt each other. But they cannot say good-bye to the scorn-filled romance. The strip's scenes show a totally different lifestyle from that of "Double Big Guns." The two lovers and their friends have a world-weary air about them. They are fashionably dressed, they work out, play tennis, hang out in bars, dine in chichi restaurants, smoke, carry cellular telephones, and long for love—but without the commitment. Chu describes his characters: "I am looking at people who are in their twenties and thirties, total individualists who cannot be loyal to a single lover or job. They hunt for the new and the better, and they have no principles."
The characters are nameless, except for the leading lady. Hsiaohung has a tight little perm, and she looks bored all the time. Despite her sophistication and seeming nonchalance about love, she is obsessed with getting married. She tells a friend after a workout, ''I've been to three fortunetellers. One said I’d marry at thirty-one, the other said thirty-two, and the last one said thirty-five." Her friend asks, "Which do you think is right?" "Oh," she says, ''I'll get married all three times."
Her boyfriend has the short, spiked haircut of a rap singer, and sunglasses are a permanent fixture on his face. Their scenes together are as warm as a snake pit. At a bar, she says to him, "See that man getting drunk next to you? Ever since I rejected him, he hasn't stopped drinking." He says, "He's been celebrating that long?" In another instance, he asks her, "Who did God create first?" "Adam," she says. "And who did he create next?" he asks. "Eve," she says. "And his third creation?" "The marriage counselor," she replies.
In "Wayward Lovers" Chu departs from the slapstick humor of "Double Big Guns," and displays a stinging wit as he pokes fun at the preoccupations of the two lovers. It is a funny strip, and the characters are not difficult to like or to identify with. The strips have been compiled into an album, and in its first two months it sold 40,000 copies. He says, "I think my readers identify with my illustrations of the conflict between the two sexes. It doesn't matter how old or how young they are."
The followers of "Double Big Guns" and "Wayward Lovers" range from teenagers to people in their forties. And according to Chu, his female readers react more strongly—whether positively or negatively. A few women's organizations have protested Chu's portrayal of women as fortune hunters. "I don't think I discriminate against women," he says. "I think my work is free of any bias, it's just misinterpreted." He pulls out an example. In one "Wayward Lovers" strip, a small boy· asks the main male character, "What's a safe toy?" The man replies, "A woman who won't require a man to take responsibility afterwards."
"Some women were offended," he says, "when all I wanted to show was what a curse a man is." But he adds that it doesn't bother him if his strips cause some resentment. "They don't aim to—and they cannot—please everyone," he says.
Working out the plot of his strips is the most difficult and time-consuming part for Chu. But once he's thought it out, drawing takes only a few minutes. In addition to "Double Big Guns" and "Wayward Lovers," he has also created "Capitalists," about a cigar-chomping, high-handed employer, for the Commercial Daily. "Bitter Olive," a political satire which speaks through soldier characters, appears in the Liberty Times. (Comic strips are not syndicated in Taiwan.)
Two days out of a week, he takes off from household chores and caring for his son and four cats to do the strips. He sits at his cluttered desk by the window, sets his pad above a pile of papers, and smokes until his ash tray is filled with a mountain of cigarette butts. He uses more than half the length of a panel for his characters' bodies, and emphasizes posture, and the shape of their hands and feet. "There's a lot to body language," he says. Hsiaohung, for example, is often shown with her arms folded. "I keep drawing until I can feel their personalities come alive naturally," he says. And he adds that it takes about half a year before artist and characters are comfortable with each other.
Chu stands out among Taiwan's cartoonists because his strips express a rare sardonic wit. He is often asked where he gets his ideas. "I have to look for them," he says. And he finds them by reading a lot, mostly short stories and non-fiction, and by seeing a lot of movies. "Horror films are my favorite," he says. He also reads Western comic strips, and has a special fondness for European cartoons. "They dwell on life. They look quite simple, but actually they have profound meanings. Those cartoons are true forever."
He is hard pressed to single out a cartoonist he likes. "I always tell people not to look too much at the creator, but at the work. After all, great cartoonists can produce bad stuff, too." He is just as reluctant to compare himself with Taiwan's other cartoonists, and would rather leave the job to the critics. But he finds that there are too few cartoonists around, and even less variety. He says that the lifting of the ban on new newspapers in 1988 did not help too much in increasing the number of comic strip artists or cartoonists. "Things are dull around here," he says. "We have only three types of comics—political caricature, a retelling of old historical tales, and funny jokes." He has been trying, for the past few years to create strips that are without words and that cover broader and more current issues in politics, the military, and society. But his conclusion is that the time is not yet right for them to be published.
His desire to express himself has been so well-fulfilled by his comic strips that he has lost interest in pursuing his earlier fascination with film. "Cartoonists are allowed more freedom and honesty," he says. "In filmmaking, there are too many people who can distort an original idea."
It is a decision that sits well with the artist and his characters. And as Chu Teh-yung says in the preface to one of his albums, "Sometimes when I sit in front of my window, my pen in my hand, I can feel my two big guns running around me. I can even hear them breathing while they watch me draw. I have to thank Taipei, this ridiculous city, and my readers for giving life to my friends."