Love!

Here's one I banged out quickly so it could be in Groove in a timely manner. I'm actually pretty happy with the way it turned out. Less punchline-driven, more focused on over-arching hilarity.

So yeah, dating cross-culturally can have its difficult moments, particularly when family gets involved. As this comic illustrates, most are due to cultural differences, language barriers and our own silly apprehensions. I've experienced it all first-hand, as I'm sure most other foreigners in Korea have. Whoever said meeting the family was easy though?

They like me!

So Groove is a free English-language magazine in South Korea and they've been shipping my comics all over the peninsula since August. I've always been thrilled that my work is getting such amazing distribution in such a great magazine, but now I'm even more thrilled to be honored with a contributor's award for Best Comic of the Year! It's only been about 6 months too!

Thanks to all the cats at Groove for being such groovy cats.

New comic up soon!

Progress Reports

And while we're at it...

MacBook Woes

I use a mac and that's never been an issue. Granted, I don't play computer games, but still, I would have to go out of my way to require a function of my computer that it could not perform. Plus, owning a PC for me would mean having to become a lot more wary of the web and its nasty downloadables. So life's been easy in my mac bubble.

Until I got to Korea.

In Korea, macs are still some kind of a weird fringe fetish. iPhones have given the Apple brand a bit more respect and retail space, but the public has yet to hop on the mac train the way the Western world has. Thusly, a whole bunch of Korean websites lack mac compatibility for many of their necessary functions. Ordering Domino's pizza, paying by credit card on G-Market and doing online banking with KEB all require me to download an .exe file, or else just go do business elsewhere.

Then there's the websites which just plain refuse to function unless they are being accessed through the medium of Internet Explorer. Like some banjo-plucking country folk who don't take kindly to Google Chrome's "fancy talk", the website will pull up a white screen, have non-functioning drop down boxes or just sit idly and refuse to budge as you continuously click on something. You need to dumb it down and use the browser of the people.

The easy solution is to, of course, use ol' dusty IE, but then, once again, mac woes rear their heads. Internet Explorer on mac exists, but Microsoft stopped supporting it 8 years ago. So it doesn't work, effectively rendering certain websites inaccessible. I can't do my online progress reports or book tickets from certain airlines all because the websites will not talk to any of the browsers my computer supports.

But, I have hopes for the future. Just as folks in Korea are broadening their horizons to include different brands of beer and automobiles, soon they shall too embrace the exotic pleasures of the Apple computer. And why would any website want to deny its services to that kind of forward-thinking, taste-making clientele?

Hey other blogs!

As a relatively new blog, by a not so relatively new blogger, you can be sure of 2 things:

1: Pretty much nobody is following me right now.

2: I have some experience churning out content. Good content!

If you like what's below, please follow me and give me big ups on your blog! I'll do the same and add a link to you on the ol' sidebar. Having only one link over there makes me feel and look sad.

And if you have the time, feel free to check out any of my older blogs:

The Road Warriors

Jon Goes To Korea

Not to mention my tumblr and twitter over on the right.

THANKS!

Konglish

For those who haven't figured out the portmanteau, Konglish is an amalgam of Korean and English and is used to describe anything from pronunciation quirks to odd word usage in a Korean speaker's English. I'm jibing on the pronunciation in the above comic, but really, it's quite easy to understand exactly why Koreans pronounce certain words the way they do.

See, The Korean language really likes to buffer its consonants with vowels. They hate ending words on certain consonants as well. When we start getting them to transliterate our chewy, consonant-rich words, things start getting a little hairy for them. In a word like "Christmas", the ch and r and the st and m both need buffer vowels. Also, ending on an s is a problem, so a vowel needs to come along and sort that out. So we get this character: ㅡ . It makes an "eu" sound, so "Christmas" comes out sounding like "keu-ri-seu-ma-seu". A native Korean speaker will just instinctively add these extra vowels in.

IT'S A FACT!

On fitting in

You know, when I first got here, I was pretty keen on not becoming one of those foreigners that spends all their time drinking in Itaewon and complaining. I'm still not, but I'm definitely circling the drain. And I'd say much of it has to do with the fact that I will never fit in here. I'm learning Korean, but it's taking forever. If I'm lucky, by the time I leave, I'll be able to grunt out a few rudimentary thoughts and earn a pat on the head for it. Even if I become insanely fluent and master all manner of etiquette and subtlety, I'll still get dragged into those dogged "Where are you from?" conversations.

But I haven't given up yet. Not depicted in this comic is me trying to cram my ungainly Western-ness into that very particular Korean mold; precisely refined by years of compounded etiquette. I'd like to think that these efforts are appreciated more than the sheer abandon shown by the fat dude in the Crocs, busting his way through.

EDIT: Here I am:

Some nomenclature

An ajumma is an old Korean lady. There is some kind of consensus among all of them that cutting your hair short, getting a perm and wearing giant Bingo hall visors is the way to go. Maybe it's social pressure. Those who do not conform are ostracized and left out of the juiciest gossip circles. Maybe they just all think it's a hot look. Regardless of the motive, the ajummatti is a force to be reckoned with. They rush into subways like a silver torrent, claiming your space like you were never entitled to it in the first place. Their seemingly innocuous trot music is no doubt riddled with codes of allegiance. Those visors? Gang colors signifying fealty to some ajumma clan or another. And you can be sure that with one phone call, they can absolutely CRIPPLE the city's supply of puffed snacks, cheap socks, backscratchers and baby chicks.

Welcome to Korea

Growing up, my elementary school had a sink that dispensed water when you stepped on a lever. The janitor kept having to replace it though because the kids who needed water kept stomping the hell out of it. Sometimes six at a time, gangland beat down style. As a teacher who provides more than just water, you can be sure that your composure will suffer a similar, if not worse, fate.

Drink up!