Drawing fame and fortune

Provided to China Daily

Another cat known as Luo Xiaohei, is proving very popular. Luo Xiaohei is black, has a long tail and lives a heroic life depicted in short animated movies.

Luo Xiaohei's creator Zhang Ping came up with his heroic cat in a short animation in 2011, which soon became a hit and has since been developed into a serial.

The animation tells a funny story about a girl and her pet cat who used to be a monster. Now the black cat has about 200,000 fans on Sin a Weibo, one of China's biggest weibo websites.

"I never thought of selling my film to television stations. I just went to the Internet," says Zhang Ping, 29, from Zhejiang province.

His fans call him MTJJ in the cyber world, an abbreviation of Chinese pinyin meaning wooden block, which Chinese people use to describe someone who's taciturn like Zhang Ping and his black cartoon cat.

After resigning from a cartoon company, MTJJ spent several months producing the first episode of his serial animated film in 2011 on his own. Producing the film himself and distributing it online meant the five-minute film cost as little as 3,000 yuan ($490) to make.

Now the production team has added four employees, and has produced seven episodes.

Like Zhang and Xu, MTJJ has his own e-commerce store on Taobao, China's leading e-commerce platform, to sell products related to his animation hero Luo Xiaohei. About 1,000 black cat dolls were sold in July.

Provided to China Daily

"We provide free animation online. All the profits come from our cat-related products. Just producing animation in China can't make any money," MTJJ says.

The cartoonist says he spends every day drawing. He says he is happy with his cartooning work but has few thoughts about how to develop his cartoon brand in the future.

"If I am given a big sum of money by some investors, I really don't know how to deal with the money," he says. His goal is to make high-quality animations and increase the black cat's popularity.

Wu Guanying, a professor of the department of information art and design at Tsinghua University, says Chinese cartoonists are still learning from the cartoon giants in the West and Japan.

Even the Internet has helped to push more Chinese cartoonists to the spotlight, but to develop a unique style needs more time, Wu continues.

"If they want to go further and longer, they need a professional team to cultivate their cartoon brands."