Chinese comics artists create comic strips with colorful topics, from Taoism, to fox-demon fantasy. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Adapting to changes

Tencent Comics and Kuaikan Comics, both launched in 2014, are two of the most popular comics apps in the Chinese market, which is made up of hundreds of smaller players catering to a wide range of readers.

Li Yan, 20, majors in telecommunication engineering at Beijing Union University. She began to read comics on apps last year and has both comic apps installed on her smartphone.

Li was asked to select her gender the first time she used the apps because they were apparently customized to cater to different types of readers－girls and women usually went for romance stories while the boys and men would opt for violent ones.

"Sometimes I'd select the opposite gender to see what was being offered on the other side," says Li.

The increasing number of selections means she can pick the ones that are familiar to her daily life and interests, Li says. Her favorite comic is Junlin Chenxia, a fiction piece based on the history of the Three Kingdoms period (220-280).

"I used to read them on computers, which meant that I could only immerse myself in the world of comics when there was a computer around me," says Li.

"Now with apps on my phone, I can read the comics anywhere as long as I have it with me."