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Saturday, November 01, 2008

Dinosaur Comics!

So, there's a comic I read at called Dinosaur Comics, and it's totally great, and the deal with it is that the pictures are ALWAYS THE SAME AND COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO THE PLOT. Yet it somehow manages to be extremely hilarious, nearly without exception. A while ago, browsing the site, I found out that a teacher in Japan once did a project with his kids where he took the text out of the comic and let the kids, bless their little hearts, try their darndest to make up a story in a language they don't know to match up with pictures that don't make too much sense. The results: mostly muck, but a few gems as well.

Seeing that, I of course decided I would need to do the same. So I bid my time, waiting until Halloween, and then sprung the project on my kids and coworkers. Our kids are generally ok at finishing work and answering questions and even forming sentences according to models in the book, but as you'll see, even the best ones can't make it through 6 frames without some sort of grammatical error, and some of the kids are really terrible, though they've been studying English for 5 or more years. While part of me feels quite guilty for taking advantage of this in order to get some sweet comics, the other part says, well, at least I got them to try writing something in English that they didn't just copy out of a workbook. And at least I have some sweet home-brewed DINOSAUR COMICS MADE BY KOREAN PREPUBESCENTS! Better than all the Halloween candy in the world!

Follow the link above to see some of the more interesting comics. I've included some commentary, which, in my humble opinion, was totally hilarious and fun to make. I hope you enjoy. You can even print them out for use as Christmas Cards or something. I'm pretty sure that Korea doesn't enforce copyright laws - maybe it doesn't even have any - so go ahead and stick it to Hallmark without fear of repercusssion!

Also, I promise, soon I'll actually write about being in Korea. Tomorrow is Mountain-climbing-trip day with the middle aged squash players club, and I'm going to get all decked out in my hyphenated pants and new travel shoes, and will hopefully take beautiful pictures of Korean Foliage and also middle aged men acting like teenagers, screaming and chucking rocks at each other and who knows what!

Also, T-1 month until I leave. How time flies!

1 comment:

Bob Harwig said...

The commentary was very helpful.

What preparation did you give them about the Dinosaur Comics? Anything that might have led them to do it in a specific way?

Also, the clockwise ordering is a huge step in comic strip possibilities. Reminds me of some of the Cyanide and Happiness comics that break through the boxes of the comic with hilarious results.