With half the country in holiday mode today, and the other half grumbling from the office that they didn’t get to start their weekend yesterday (who’ll be grumbling on Sunday?), there’s perhaps no better time to have a laugh. So, allow me to draw your attention to a great site full of China-themed comics: MandMX.
Created by a cross-cultural couple, Magnus and Mingxing (M and MX), the site offers up daily situational, language-themed or current-event based comics about China. And Lost Laowai has been featured!
(see the original here)
And we’re not the only ones (see comics about two of my favourite Web sites – chinaSMACK and Sinosplice). The site takes it one better and offers the opportunity for anyone’s funny “China story” to be made into a comic.
If the comic laughs aren’t enough, be sure to watch some of the videos of MandMX’s son Ryan (great name!) teaching you Chinese!
LOL
I like it that they translated the name into Chinese ^_^
Thanks for the write up Ryan. Glad we could give you a smile!
By the way, awesome post by one of your posters about LAOWAI’s Soundtrack. I downloaded a couple of those songs… AWESOME!
@Ryan I never knew that you were important enough to be featured in a comic book, I guess I should start asking for your autograph soon!!!
@Magnus thanks for the kudos, but you should really thank people like The Arcade Fire, The National, and ones with far more talent than I have 🙂
Forgive me for being sort of mean and suspicious here (and, in the process, ensuring no one ever writes a comic about ChinaGeeks), but none of these comics are really all that funny at all…given that they’re suddenly writing these comics about giant China blogs that get a bunch of traffic, it seems to me like they’re just fishing for links…but I don’t really want to accuse anyone of anything, I’m just saying, that’s how it comes off to me personally.
As a sidenote, and I realize this is being critical again, writing a comic in Chinese and English strikes me as extremely limiting, humor-wise, which is probably why I don’t find any of these comics funny. It’s an interesting undertaking, and I certainly wouldn’t want to try it myself, as any form of language based, or even culture-based, humor is more or less out. In college I wrote and drew a comic for several years with a roommate of mine who now works for The Onion. Some of the stuff we did was really funny (all credit due to him, not me), but I’m pretty sure transliting it into Chinese would get a lot of blank stares…
Anyway, I really have nothing against this guy or his site at all, so I probably should just shut up. Congrats.
Fishing for links? Dang it! How did you know?
Not Funny? Come on, Charlie…in over 150 comics you didn’t chuckle once? I gotta work harder!
PS. how do you say GEEK in Chinese?
There are certainly easier ways to getting links from Lost Laowai. I pretty much add anyone to our blogroll that asks.
As for funny – it’s subjective I guess. I browsed through a few and they got more than a chuckle out of me. This was one that did:
More than anything else though, I just like supporting people in our relatively small blogsphere – particularly those doing unique and creative things.
@Charlie Certainly they are not laugh-out-loud funny, and initially I thought the humor might come across better in their Chinese versions. But now I just think they simply meant to be cute.
(And if they are just fishing for links, what a creative way to go about it!)
Well, points to Magnus for taking that completely unprovoked criticism quite well…I continue to feel like a bit of a jerk for even posting it, and I’ll admit I haven’t read the whole archive Magnus…but I spent some time on the site today flipping through it and didn’t find much…different strokes for different folks I guess, anyway, I will just shut up now. Normally if I had nothing nice to say, I’d say nothing, I’ve just been feeling a bit of excess rage lately…I think it has to do with the Detroit Red Wings being in the Stanley Cup again this year.
@Charlie: That pisses me off too 😉
AH YA… not cute. They are supposed to be sophisticated STEPHEN!!!
Fine, Charlie, when I publish my first book of MandMX comics I’ll be sure to send you one. But not Stephen… Cute…ugh!
Nobody can help me with GEEK in Chinese??
Actually, I have no idea about Geek in Chinese either. When I was making the site, I had a long discussion with my (then) girlfriend about this, and we couldn’t come up with anything in Chinese that had the same meaning. The closest we got, I think, was ä¸å›½é€š and ä¸å›½è¿· (anything more literal ended up only having negative connotations in Chinese), but neither of those really fit for me. ä¸å›½é€š makes it sound like we already know everything, and ä¸å›½è¿· sort of makes it sound like we approve of everything China does.
Hence the Chinese motto of the site being 我看ä¸å›½. It seems there is no word in Chinese that really captures the feeling of the English. Although to be fair maybe my (then) girlfriend and I just couldn’t think of one.
Thought I’d just chime in with an opinion:
Beause ‘geek’ is very much a Western word with its own nuances and culture, just translating it as an odd person (something like ‘怪人 or 畸形人’) makes little sense.
I see in Chinese some tend to transliterate – “æžå®¢â€æ˜¯æ¥è‡ªè‹±æ–‡”Geek”一è¯çš„翻译，åˆè¯‘作“奇客â€
（http://www.geekg.com/geek）
Like Charlie says, ä¸å›½é€š and ä¸å›½è¿· don’t have the right mix of 褒义 and 贬义 that makes ‘geek’ so interesting.
Hilarious!! I love these comic strips!!
æžå®¢ [jÃkè]
1. 1. noun [网络èŠå¤©ç”¨è¯] geek; someone whose main interest is electronic equipment, especially equipment connected with computers and the Internet, and who spends too much time buying this equipment and using it
I WIN!!
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