The nuance conveyed in the dialectical design of the companion volumes counteracts the mythmaking that can result from combining history and fable in comic book form. The indie comic artist Gene Luen Yang, a child of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States and an observant Roman Catholic, wrestles with the central ambiguity of colonialism throughout his remarkable set of linked graphic novels, “Boxers” and “Saints,” recently named to the long list for the National Book Award in young people’s literature. They also came in search of easy profits from the opium trade, and waged a war to ensure those profits kept flowing. The Westerners had arrived preaching a Christian message of peace and compassion. The belief did not survive the test of experience, but did earn the Boxer Rebellion an enduring place in popular memory.Īn alliance of British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, American, Italian and Japanese soldiers easily crushed the Boxers and the imperial Chinese soldiers who joined them, but not before the Boxers had killed more than 30,000 Chinese Christian converts. In the late 1890s, peasants from the north, affronted by Western influence in the empire, formed a secret society to practice the martial and spiritual disciplines of Chinese folk religion, which some believed made them invulnerable to European bullets and cannon fire.

Twenty million people died in the ensuing chaos. The slow crackup of China’s last imperial dynasty during its “century of humiliation” was so fantastical it could have been made up by a comic book artist: an aspiring civil servant failed his entrance exam, fell into a delirium, dreamed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ sent to deliver China from the Qing dynasty and ignited the Taiping Rebellion in 1850.

Yang boxers and saints