Bob Schwartz

The Lunar New Year, which begins today (Year of the Fire Horse), is fun.

For fun, I scoured the comic book archives to see if there were any stories centered on Lunar New Year.

Not many. I found one from the 1940s—actually an entire comic book series—so racist that I could not show it, other than to say that like the popular Charlie Chan movies of the era, it is worth considering how backwards many were in viewing the cultures of half the world.

The comic book story included here, Year of the Tiger, is from First Kiss (1962). It is a little more enlightened, though still not perfect in its stereotyping. Part of the great number of romance comic books of the 1950s and 1960s, the story concerns a Chinese-American young woman who is sad on the New Year because she is about to be forced into an arranged marriage. She tries to run away, only to run into a Chinese-American young man who is also trying to run away from an arranged marriage. They fall in love and—spoiler alert—it turns out that the arranged marriage was between the two of them! It is indeed a Happy New Year!