Through anthropological scholarship, particularly Ming-ke Wang’s fieldwork and analysis, the legend was extracted from its community context and stabilized within modern academic discourse as a comparative historical phenomenon. A recent Taiwanese comic adaptation further translates this scholarly knowledge into visual narrative form for a broad Sinophone readership, explicitly drawing on academic research as its epistemic foundation. This chain of translation produces a fundamental shift in function: as the legend moves across oral, textual, and visual forms, it becomes detached from its original practice-based authority and reconstituted as a portable object of historical knowledge. What was once a community-embedded legend becomes an open, pedagogical narrative oriented toward external readers, circulating within the public sphere.
Examining the material and formal properties of comics, this paper argues that comics do not merely illustrate indigenous knowledge but reconfigure it as an epistemic form. As infrastructures of historical cognition, comics shape interpretive pathways and render indigenous history legible across cultural and linguistic boundaries, enabling its entry into a shared Sinophone historical imagination. The modern afterlife of “Poisonous Cat” thus demonstrates how visual media transform minority knowledge into publicly narratable forms of historical heritage in late modernity.