Chinese Comics Review

Ping Pong #03: a visually-stunning package of risograph comics

Posted on by Jason Li

Photo of Ping Ping 03 package

Ping Pong #03 is all about the printed, physical object, and the results are stunning. Eschewing the convention of a single, bound book, Ping Pong #03 comes as a lushly-packaged set of seven booklets, written and illustrated by seven different artists. While every booklet looks visually distinct, they all bear the mark of the risograph printing process: bright,…

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Online translation communities in China, a brief overview

Posted on by Jason Li

From Chuan Yu’s Online Translation Communities in Chinese Cyberspace [we’ve added screenshots of the sites mentioned for extra context]:

Since the arrival of the Internet about 30 years ago, the practice of translation has also moved online. A number of online translation communities have been established for various purposes. In general, there are two types: audio-visual and text-oriented translation communities.…

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Chinese Comics Review

Whacky on Weibo: Dick Ng’s collected webcomics

Posted on by Jason Li

DickNgCover

Ng’s webcomics are snappy, short and whacky. His comics are native to Weibo (a Twitter-like service), his strips thrive as self-contained, single-page gags. While other cartoonists in China might publish 100+ page works on Douban (a Tumblr-like service) or one of the many webcomic portals (e.g. 有妖气), Ng focuses primarily on creating short comics on Weibo where…

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Chinese Comics Review

Kylooe: an emotionally-charged comics trilogy about trying to fit in

Posted on by Jason Li

Kylooe Trilogy Covers

The Kylooe trilogy brings us three stories of people who are trying their best to fit in with society. In book one, a shy, introverted schoolgirl struggles in her first days at a new middle school. In book two, a broadband salesman reminisces about his first, failed love. And finally, in the last book, a delivery boy finds himself stuck…

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Why US trash ends up in China (not because labor is cheaper!)

Posted on by An Xiao Mina

From Susan Jake’s LARB review of Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter:

The reason most US trash flows to China is not, as is popularly believed, because of China’s low cost of labor and weak environmental protection (or, at least, not primarily). If it were, Minter says, we’d send our trash to Sudan, and Sudan wouldn’t be sending its…

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Chinese Comics Review

A Borrowed Life: a superb comic memoir of a flawed Taiwanese patriarch

Posted on by Jason Li

Cover of A Borrowed Life

In A Borrowed Life, esteemed Taiwanese writer-director Wu Nien-jen pays tribute to his working-class father by telling the latter’s life story. His story was made into an award-winning movie way back in 1994 (also called A Borrowed Life), and now it has been retold in comic form. The graphic novel has a grand, sweeping, filmic quality…

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Typography Design

Chinese fonts are really, really hard to make

Posted on by Jason Li

Nikhil Sonnad has penned a great primer on Chinese fonts on Quartz called The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font. Much of the article describes the lengths designers must go to in order to create Chinese font:

The default set for English-language fonts contains about 230 glyphs. A font that covers all of the…

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Starting Up in Shenzhen

A fictionalized tale of 1 upper-class, 1 lower-class woman working in fashion in Shenzhen

Posted on by Jason Li

Zoe Ho from Seeed has started a great series on Medium: a parable of two women from the extreme ends of the economic spectrum who both work in the fashion industry in Shenzhen:

CoCo… is always talked about, gossiped or admired with jealousy. Sometimes she cannot accept any imperfection, and would like to get…

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