Hot Net Hotel

Reviews Hagai Palevsky | November 3, 2026 In 2023, my fellow TCJ-ite Tegan O’Neil described 20km/h, a collection of short comics by the Chinese cartoonist Woshibai, as “an exquisitely muffled yawp of defiance against a world that offers no better personal outlet than the cudgel of petty irony.” At the time Tegan’s read intrigued me in part because in my own review of the same book I had not considered the political element at all (my understanding of the Chinese political system was, and remains, far too rudimentary for any analytical comfort) — what seized my attention was Woshibai’s preoccupation with perspective play and scale-deceptions. I return to Tegan’s words not just because Woshibai is among the contributors to Hot Net Hotel — the first volume of System, Paradise Systems’ anthology showcasing contemporary Chinese cartooning — but because in point of fact a lot of the pieces in the anthology follow a shockingly similar mold: whether this is a broader cultural pattern or simply a preference of the anthology’s curators, most of Hot Net Hotel’s stories assume a microfiction mode, eschewing expository details and a tidy narrative-emotional "arc" in favor of concentrated real-t...