While Digital Humanities (DH) scholarship has extensively engaged with Western and Japanese graphic narratives, Chinese lianhuanhua—pocket-sized comic books—remain largely overlooked. This proposed short paper reports on a major work-in-progress: the digitization and metadata database creation for a unique collection of these ephemeral materials. First, we outline the conceptual framing and digitization strategies for a collection of over 3,000 lianhuanhua. We address the preservation challenges posed by their material instability and the critical need for an openly accessible digital infrastructure. Second, we detail the technical implementation of our project’s metadata backbone. We present a case study on digitizing a comprehensive bibliographical catalogue containing publication data for over 35,000 lianhuanhua titles. We outline our reproducible, semi-automated workflow, which utilizes PaddlePaddle OCR for complex Chinese character extraction, alongside a hybrid approach of Large Language Models and Python (pandas) to semantically parse and structure the disorganized text into a 38-column relational database. This rigorous standardization resolves significant hermeneutic challenges in data management. Ultimately, building this massive, machine-readable dataset paves the way for advanced DH applications—such as network analysis and geospatial mapping but also for other kinds of catalogue digitization—to answer foundational questions about the canon, mass-print popularity, and longue durée evolution of Chinese socialist comics. By bridging physical artifacts with digital information spaces, this paper offers a scalable workflow relevant to the broader DH and global cultural studies communities.