you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

I did these senior year, with the intent of submitting them to the Wesleyan Argus, but never did. I chose the name Helvetica, though I can’t remember why.

This one is probably a comment about the overly-PC climate of the US at the time, or of Wesleyan. Mjölk is Swedish for milk (I lived in Stockholm for a semester).

This one is of a girl dreaming of the impossible. Weshop is the campus grocery store, run by Aramark, where everything is priced at 2-3x what they cost in the real world. It is the only place for students to shop for food and supplies, since we were all required to participate in the meal plan. The alternative was to spend real dollars at the Stop ‘n’ Shop, which was several minutes away by car. The walls indicate that this is a student in the Butterfield dorms, though I never lived there.

My brother brought over some things from his house.. hand-me-downs and stuff he didn’t need anymore, including 2 Kogepan books, to my surprise. I didn’t think he would have Japanese children’s books. Before I went to Japan, I had come across a small figure of Kogepan (a keychain or something) in a Chinatown Sanrio gift shop. With his big head and round, pupil-less eyes, I thought he was some strange alien.

Kogepan is a San-X character. I always assumed San-X was an imprint of Sanrio, given the similarity of their names, just like Touchstone Pictures is an imprint of the Walt Disney Company, created to produce all the films deemed too risque for the parent company to produce, howevre San-X is, in fact, a totally different company.. Sanrio’s characters are too sanitized and cutesy.. decidedly uber-G-rated stuff that would even make a nursery school teacher gag. San-X, on the other hand, has a real assortment of colorful personalities: little punks (Batz maru), lazy bums (Tare Panda, Relakkuma), Afro dogs.. characters that like to drink beer (Beer-chan), lie around all day and sleep. They’re all insanely cute.

Today, I brought one of the Kogepan books to work and my Creative Director asked me what that was. I told him it’s a San-X character. Then I looked him up on Wikipedia and followed the link to San-X, where to my shock, I found out that I’ve been living in the dark all these years. San-X and Sanrio are actualy two completely separate companies!

Here is my version of Kogepanda.. an oyaji gag (Japanese version of a really corny joke). This is also one of the few times I’ve had the patience to fuss with Illustrator’s Mesh Gradient Tool. I never bothered to learn it until a few months ago.

Looks a little like Tare Panda.. and if i had made his mouth any bigger, he would also look like Namacha-panda. Maybe I’ll call him Choco-panda.. choco-pan is chocolate bread in Japanese, and panda is… you guessed it: a panda!

Here’s another really LAME and old oyaji gag. “Take” in Japanese means bamboo, but it is also slang for expensive (shortened form of “takai”). Kansai-ben (dialect) is now very popular with young people in Japan, so you’ll hear a lot of kids saying “sugee~!” (awesome/super/cool) instead of “sugoi“, and “kimoii!!” (nasty/gross/creepy/uncool) and “omoroi” (interesting/funny) instead of “kimochi warui” and “omoshiroi“.

Today, I looked through my server logs and found that a 10 year old Dutch girl has hotlinked this image on her site! I’m guessing she’s 10. I can’t read Dutch.

This, ladies and gentleman, is a beavoon. Not quite a beaver, not qite a racoon, but something in the middle.. and a very sloppy eater.