ABSTRACT
Around 90% of the comics sold in Taiwan are translations of Japanese manga. Wei Tsung-cheng is one of the only local artists who has achieved enough success within this market that he is able to make a living primarily from drawing original comics. Wei’s manga series Ming Zhan-lu: Final Destiny of the Formosan Gods simultaneously localizes the Japanese manga system and reframes Taiwanese folk religion through the subcultural aesthetics of manga fandom. Ming Zhan-lu’s combination of genres and its visual style are typical of Japanese manga. Yet its settings are Taipei and San-hsia, and its main characters are the goddess Mazu (reincarnated as a sexy-cute high school student) and high school students who are also magical Daoist masters. Through a textual and visual analysis of Ming Zhan-lu, this chapter explores how the young generation of Taiwanese are reconceptualizing their religious traditions. I argue that the series modernizes the “imperial metaphor” (Feuchtwang) by making the world of the gods a representational democracy and merges traditional Chinese concepts of geomancy and ancestor worship with those of Shinto animism.
