China’s most celebrated comic-strip character is, without doubt, Zhang Leping’s Sanmao, or “Three Hairs.” After inventing Sanmao in 1935, Zhang updated the wordless escapades of his big-headed orphan boy across fifty years of a changing historical landscape: from the War of Resistance against Japan, to Civil War-era Shanghai, the mass campaigns of the 1950s, and the post-Mao reform era. Studies of Zhang’s art have largely centered on The Wandering Life of Sanmao (Sanmao liulangji), the most iconic and extensive iteration of the Sanmao comics, serialized through more than 250 installments in the Shanghai daily newspaper Dagongbao (L’Impartial) from 1947 to 1948. These studies generally approach Wandering Life as a source of information on social and historical realities during China’sCivil War period. Taken for granted, however, is how the content of Wandering Life was conditioned by certain abstract and globalized forms. One of these forms was the Sanmao character itself, which belonged to the genealogy of the serial comic-strip personality, originated in Europe and elaborated in the United States, who bounces back after repeated defeat. But more broadly, Sanmao himself inhabited the open-ended serial form of the daily comic strip, which was in turn embedded in the open-ended serial form of the daily newspaper. This paper explores how these two virtual and globalized forms, the comic strip and the daily paper, together mediated Wandering Life in ways that suggest a rethinking of how the strip, and other serialized sources, should be approached as historical information.