English
2020
Published by Paradise Systems
7.5 x 12.5 cm, 44 pages, b/w, glue bound, softcover
Third edition
Gantea’s illustrations are beautifully simple, yet portray such subtle and specific emotions. In one of the stories illustrated in Two Stories, animals crawl out of a person’s social media feed and into her lap, and in the second, two rabbits on a movie date get too nervous to hold hands. Gantea blends the surreal and the quotidian in these two sets of illustrations, imbuing thin, minimalist lines with anxiety, joy, and regret.
gantea was born in Urumqi and now lives in Beijing. Her favorite animals are the manatee and the anteater.
This book is part of Paradise System’s series of contemporary lianhuanhua.
Lianhuanhua were a wildly popular form of twentieth-century pulp comics. Featuring a landscape orientation with one image per page, these pocket-size comics were sold in China for a few pennies each and had print runs numbering in the hundred thousands or millions. Their subject matter was diverse, including fables, kung fu epics, and unauthorized adaptations of foreign films. Before the 1990s when televisions became widely accessible, lianhuanhua were a staple of Chinese pop culture.
This series lianhuanhua-style books celebrates this unique comics lineage with new work by contemporary cartoonists.