He Just Wanted to Sell Line Stickers. Instead He Made That Viral "Black Pineapple" Video | 100 People With Ideas

There is also the "you've got some squid" version of Peninsula Iron Box (《半岛铁盒》), and the "dropped dead" version of 3 A.M. (《凌晨三点钟》)…

"I want more than a million fans on my Facebook page. Only then will I feel I have even a little bit of fame."

The cartoonist Onion Man has 270,000 fans on Facebook, a long way from his target of a million. Past experience says that every corny-joke comic video he posts nudges the count up a little. The recent "Black Pineapple" video sent it jumping.

You remember that one, don't you? G.E.M., the song's original singer, shared the "Black Pineapple" video on both Facebook and Weibo with the line "I want to be given a black pineapple too…" In the video, on a dark and windy night with nobody around, a girl shyly and obliquely presents a "black pineapple" to the boy she likes, to make her feelings known — because in Cantonese, "I like you" sounds like the Mandarin words for "black pineapple." For a while, "this black pineapple is my heart!" was the killer move for confessing a crush.

As things stand, that Facebook post has been viewed nearly 2.6 million times and liked about 50,000 times. The video took off on Weibo as well, reaching the trending list with 220,000 cumulative searches, and Onion Man's other homophone-lyric videos followed it there: the "you've got some squid" version of Peninsula Iron Box (《半岛铁盒》), the horror-thriller "Jody Chiang version" of Model (《模特》), the "dropped dead" version of 3 A.M. (《凌晨三点钟》). The jokes are corny, and people love them anyway — all of it the result of a year and three months of work that Onion Man started last April Fools' Day.

Recently he also put out a "revenge" video starring a girl named Tingting:

Before he ever picked up a pen, he was an ordinary university student in Taiwan studying electronics — a field with nothing to do with drawing or making videos: semiconductor manufacturing. Out the door at nine in the morning for class, ten hours in the lab, home exhausted at half past ten at night. That round trip, done dutifully, was Onion Man's day.

Then one day in his junior year, Onion Man saw that Line was running a contest for original sticker sets. Being able to sell stickers on an app everyone opens every day "was a really cool thing," he thought, and he was hooked. From then on, "making Line stickers" became Onion Man's "original dream."

By that point Line's platform already carried some ten thousand sticker sets of every kind, and the competition was fierce. Plenty of sets went up, drew no attention, and never sold.

"I figured that if I submitted stickers straight away, nobody would know the characters I'd drawn, so nobody would buy them. So I decided to draw comics first, and put out the stickers once my comic characters had a bit of a following."

Onion Man's Line stickers

And he did it, just like that.

To build up a following, Onion Man first set up a Facebook page, and picked April Fools' Day to publish his first comic, done in a snarky vein. He had a stingy, penny-pinching friend who was always borrowing money for meals and drinks, so everyone assumed his family was poor and was generous with him. Later, though, Onion Man discovered that this "poor kid" had bought a girl a very expensive cake…

"These stories all come from my own life," Onion Man told QDaily. But the characters Onion and Ah Wen in the comics are not modeled on him. "Later everyone just started calling me Onion, and that's how Onion Man became my name." His real name he would not give: for now, he doesn't want people who know him to find out what he's been up to.

The comic's two leads, Ah Wen and Onion — one short and pudgy, thin-haired, with a squeaky voice, the other tall and thin, with plain hair — are both modeled on the cartoonist's elementary-school classmates. Onion Man drew the pair from third grade all the way through sixth. "I was very young then, and I just thought they looked ordinary, nothing distinctive about them, so they'd be easier to draw." When he decided to start making comics, Onion Man didn't think it over much; he simply reused the two characters he'd drawn back in elementary school.

The real-life models for Onion Man's comic characters

Early work

Onion Man just "drew quietly," unwilling to tell anyone what he was doing. He hoped that one day, once he had made a name for himself, he would announce it to the world. "If I never get famous, I'll never tell anyone," he said, in complete seriousness.

When his Facebook following reached 10,000, Onion Man decided the time had come to submit to Line.

He hadn't expected the review to take so long. By the time his submission cleared, his following had passed 100,000. That was no bad thing, Onion Man thought: "Going on sale at that point, the timing actually worked out pretty well."

While he waited, Onion Man began filling out his work with new material and new forms. A friend's homophone joke gave him the idea for "singing the lyrics wrong," but after a few installments he felt his fan growth was slow and that pictures with text were not "punchy enough," so he tried making video comics.

By his own account the process isn't complicated at all. He used the crudest equipment: CyberLink PowerDirector to put the videos together, and whatever cheap microphone was at hand to record. He doesn't like asking other people to help with the voices, so he plays both parts himself, voicing Ah Wen in a falsetto an octave up.

Five months later, Onion Man's following jumped from 20,000 to 270,000. Fans also started, little by little, to send in ideas. "Every time, I tag the person whose idea I used, so people know they can send them in too. Out of 30 submissions, maybe one is actually funny." Once he has a sound-alike lyric, Onion Man builds the story's scenes and setup around it, then records the finished video.

Onion Man has graduated from university and is preparing to go to graduate school

Onion Man told the QDaily reporter that although he has never worked it out carefully, going by his cut of the revenue, his Line stickers must have sold more than 5,000 sets.

"I don't really know how many people are doing illustration right now. But I think getting people to know you, having any name recognition at all, is pretty hard. The hardest part is the work you put in before you're known — and you don't even know whether you'll ever catch on. So if you really mean to make a living at it, it's a gamble."