What Makes Taiwan's Sticker Illustrators More Popular Than Pop Stars?

Sticker illustrators have become stars of Chinese-language social media. Before we get to the ones working on WeChat, here is what the trade has been through in Taiwan — told by the island's most popular illustrators themselves.

The internet and social media have made it much easier to become a famous illustrator in Taiwan.

On platforms like LINE, a handful of illustrators have drawn original sticker sets that swept the island — what we usually call sticker packs. LINE opened its Creators Market in May 2014, a platform where anyone can put their own stickers up for sale. Two years on, it had more than 570,000 creators worldwide. A tenth of them, roughly 50,000, were from Taiwan, and the number of creators was growing 73% a year. In 2015 alone, Taiwan's five best-selling sticker sets took in an average of about 7.76 million Taiwan dollars (1.55 million yuan) each.

Just how hot are these sticker packs?

Here are the Facebook follower counts of Taiwan's five biggest online illustrators, with the characters that made their names:

1. Duncan: 3.17 million followers. Best-known character: Duncan

2. ByeByeChuChu: 1.51 million followers. Best-known characters: Pointy Head, Michael the Cat, Ole the Chicken

3. Mr. H.H: 1.44 million followers. Best-known character: Meimei

4. Roll Your Eyes, Miss Undine: 1.09 million followers. Best-known character: Undine

5. Cherng: 1.05 million followers. Best-known character: the Malayan tapir

Every one of these illustrators has more than a million Facebook followers. Duncan, the most popular, has been at it for three years and now ranks fifth among all Facebook pages in Taiwan — ahead of nearly every Taiwanese entertainer except the band Mayday.

People follow these feeds partly because the subjects are close to ordinary life, but mostly because the drawings give them something to trade with friends, or a small dose of comfort in a busy week.

Duncan is a boy in glasses and shorts. He looks utterly plain, a bit like Nobita in Doraemon, and a bit dim. But Duncan has a sharp sense of humor: anything in fashion gets turned over and played with in his hands.

The Malayan tapir is Cherng's biggest hit. Drawn in plain black-and-white lines after the animal it is named for, it is written as a bit of a slacker whose motto is "achieve nothing." It looks sweet and slightly dopey, but it keeps saying nasty things, and Taiwanese internet users love the mismatch.

Today the characters these illustrators draw have become a new set of cartoon stars in Taiwan's merchandise market, breaking a hold that American and Japanese characters once had to themselves.

This June, the Danish craft beer brand Mikkeller went to Cherng to design a label, and released a Taiwan-only bottle called Malayan Tapir's Beer Dream: Mikkeller Floating Milk Foam Beer.

It is not only small brands that want a piece of this reach. In May, Coca-Cola worked with four Taiwanese illustrators — Duncan, ByeByeChuChu, Wanwan and Lu's — on limited-edition bottles sold in Taiwan's convenience stores.

Why do brands want characters that have not yet stood the test of time?

The illustrator Yang Jianxiong explained it this way in an interview: "Foreign characters are famous, but they usually come with licensing restrictions, and when your budget is small you have little to bargain with, so there isn't much room to use the character freely. Taiwanese characters are the opposite. Social platforms have given most of them their own fans, and the clout of amateur illustrators keeps rising. They are easier to work with, the scope of a deal can be wider, and the price is more flexible. So companies are more willing to sign them."

Turning drawings into products is good news for an illustrator, though the tedious parts wait just behind it: negotiating terms with clients, handling legal work. And because brands see money in these sticker characters, illustrators have started signing with agencies, exactly as entertainers do.

Cherng, ByeByeChuChu and Shuang Shuang Cat are all with HIM International Music. In under three years they have generated an average of more than 200 million Taiwan dollars a year for the company, from image licensing, merchandise, brand tie-ups, books, and digital work such as videos made with advertisers.

HIM International began as a talent agency — S.H.E, Yoga Lin and Aaron Yan are among its acts — and only moved into representing illustrators in 2014. "Shuang Shuang Cat has a gift for words, so in the future he could try writing lyrics with our singers. ChuChu keeps pushing himself on singing. Cherng is interested in travel and in observing culture. All of that is room to work beyond illustration," the company said.

HIM International told QDaily that in the two years since it took up illustrator management, it has regularly received unsolicited pitches from design and fine-arts graduates, many of whom already run fan pages for their work.

Set against Jimmy Liao, the illustrator who defined an earlier era in Taiwan, everything has shifted: the platforms, the way the work gets made, and the kind of drawing and character that catches on.

Most illustrators of Jimmy Liao's generation and before drew for newspapers and magazines on the side. They had no channel of their own and depended on children's books or newspaper supplements. When Jimmy Liao published his work as picture books in 1998, the trade changed for the first time: the illustration became the main event rather than decoration around the text. In 2000, Li Yushan founded Jimmy S.P.A., which lifted Jimmy Liao to the status of a brand, with licensed products and crossovers into film and the stage.

Then social platforms opened up, and the trade changed again.

People who had never worked in it started drawing stickers. Yang Jianxiong made a set called Banana Man that became the most downloaded set in the first month the LINE Creators Market was open. He was not an illustrator before that. He was an engineer.

But the new sticker stars should note that without a Facebook page behind them, neither the illustrator nor the stickers stay hot for long. (WeChat official accounts now do much the same job.) Duncan started his page in 2014 because he had seen what Roll Your Eyes, Miss Undine was doing with hers, and realized there was a place where he could build his work properly.

It has proved to be exactly the right call.

For all his downloads, Yang Jianxiong knows that stickers alone cannot keep a character alive. After the set came out he opened a Facebook page and, like every other online illustrator, started posting new drawings without pause. He also released a photo app, all so the character would not be forgotten too fast.

Hollywood studios worked this out long ago, timing animated films, television series, theme parks and merchandise to reinforce each other. The internet has simply changed the route to that sense of being everywhere at once.

QDaily talked to three illustrators Facebook made famous — Cherng, ByeByeChuChu and Shuang Shuang Cat. Here is their account of the new trade:

Q: Are a lot of illustrators now using LINE's sticker platform as the place to break out? What do you make of the sticker boom?

Cherng: More ways for creators to come up is a good thing. Newcomers have asked me for advice, and my feeling is that breaking out through Facebook may not work so well anymore, since they've changed the algorithm, so I suggest they draw stickers. My first set went up at the end of 2013. It was the first paid sticker set in all of Taiwan (laughs), because at that point Taiwan had none, so I pitched LINE myself and told them my following was already large. LINE agreed in the end because Wanwan, another Taiwanese sticker illustrator, had done a free set with a kiwifruit brand that was downloaded enormously, and that opened the door — they invited Wanwan and me to make stickers. For a creator back then, making stickers for LINE was a big deal, like a singer getting to play the Hong Kong Coliseum. I drew every single one carefully. It was an important milestone. Shuang Shuang Cat: Work on LINE cares a lot about the feeling of using the sticker. The emotion has to be stronger and the idea fresher. But sets get replaced fast, and a sticker that works well in chat isn't necessarily a good image to print on a product, so that's a separate test. Building a following that lasts is hard. A sticker goes around for a week at the most, while things last longer on Facebook. ByeByeChuChu: Let me add that mine was Taiwan's first official sound sticker set (laughs). I think stickers let a creator get into the character business quickly, because when a character makes real money it's through licensing. When we're writing a story in chapters, it doesn't always match what a brand has in mind. But if the sticker's image is complete and the emotion is full, I think that's the quickest way from original stickers into character licensing. If a company only wants one image printed on a product, the fastest thing to do is look at stickers. I've gone through several sets myself, and now I'll approach younger creators to work with. It's a good direction.

Q: Is a format that gets replaced so quickly good for the illustrator?

Cherng: We still put the weight on the character itself, and that's what we watch. A sticker has a hard time carrying a personality, so the character's image matters enormously. ByeByeChuChu: It depends what you're after. With some very popular characters, none of us knew who drew them at first. If you can fold the artist's own personality in, that's a bonus. If you can't, just keep the character's quality up.

Q: Earlier illustrators were known mainly for a style, while online illustrators today all build a strong character. Is that now the easier route to fame?

Shuang Shuang Cat: I think people look for illustrators on Facebook now, and because reading on Facebook is so quick, nobody reads a long piece, and nobody stops for a picture that's too atmospheric either. That doesn't mean there are fewer illustrators like that — there are still plenty of very good ones on Pinterest and Tumblr. ByeByeChuChu: It depends on the subject. If the picture tells a story, it will still get shared. For a while everyone was passing around a drawing that used the Facebook logo to poke at people glued to their phones. I think it comes down to how it's presented. A Facebook user will scroll straight past a beautiful landscape, but add some text and people may share it. What gets shared on Facebook is whatever readers recognize themselves in.

Q: How do you differ from the illustrators of the publishing era?

Cherng: Being called an illustrator feels odd sometimes. This business is so new that there's no correct title for it. I find it strange to describe myself that way; it's hard to define. To me, the gap between us and the earlier artists is a bit like the gap between pop music and classical. But we're all creators. The difference is in the label, not in the thing itself. Shuang Shuang Cat: I love picture-book artists like Jimmy Liao. There was something wonderful about the old way, publishing a picture book with real binding — you could feel it in your hands. Better still, they might spend a year or two on one book, so the emotion in it is dense and the world is fully built. What we do on Facebook is closer to keeping people company. The two are built differently: one says, here is a world I've made, accept it; the other says, let's walk together. ByeByeChuChu: I'm not making a comparison, but we think of ourselves as character designers more than illustrators. Cathy's generation put a lot into the background and then the figure. These days a lot of people call us image-and-text creators, which shows that the text is a very important part of how we say things.

Q: Right now, what is the single most important thing for making a character work?

Cherng: Personality. Without a clear personality nobody will like it. Though at the beginning I didn't shape the personality that carefully. The early posts were mostly satire or slice-of-life. Then I started drawing the Malayan tapir attacking Yuan Zai, the panda at Taipei Zoo, mainly because they're both black-and-white animals and it struck me as funny. The tapir also has this idleness about it, and everyone's life is busy, so I often drew it lazing at home, achieving nothing. Most characters out there are gentle and agreeable, so mine drew in fans who didn't want to be like everyone else. Shuang Shuang Cat: I think it's personality too, but because it runs through Facebook, the creator's own personality affects it. The two can reinforce each other. I'm different from these two — I'm warmer, more soothing. Shuang Shuang Cat started as a way to encourage myself, and then I found students preparing for exams reading it, which is how the character took shape. A lot of people in Taiwan have the same trouble, this sense that you must sit your exams and go to work like a good child, so Shuang Shuang Cat got noticed because it said out loud what they were thinking. ByeByeChuChu: For me the most important thing is the character's visual signature. If you see a circle with two circles on top, you think of Mickey Mouse. The signature can't be complicated — black and white makes you think of the Malayan tapir; with me, anything pointy makes you think of my character. That's a crucial part of managing a character, and simple lines sit closer to cute. And because the drawings are simple lines, it's easier to turn them into physical objects, not just license the image.

Q: What do you think draws fans to you?

Cherng: I started my page in 2012, and in three or four months it had ten or twenty thousand fans. Very few people were doing image-and-text work then, so it grew fast. It's different now; the competition is brutal. Along the way, tying a post to the news made it grow quickly. The Yuan Zai episode took me from a couple of hundred thousand fans to more than half a million. But it wasn't about flattering the fans, just about striking a chord. Keeping your own personality matters more. Shuang Shuang Cat: I was on Instagram first, and through Instagram I got to know the Malayan tapir, who urged me to start a fan page. I was worried at first that nobody would read it, but it went smoothly — a thousand fans on the first day — so I thought I could really do this. Because Shuang Shuang Cat is more soothing, it works after a long day. At events, the people who turn up are exam candidates and nursing students, mostly women. One Japanese mother was incredible: for the cat's third anniversary she had Japan's Black Thunder chocolate made with custom packaging and shipped a pile of it to Taiwan. ByeByeChuChu: Back in the Wretch days — Wretch was an early Taiwanese blogging platform — the fashion wasn't to find a gag to draw, it was to draw daily life. I was using gags from the Wretch era, things like how to avoid flashing people, pointless stuff. My fans skew male and toward older women, because my drawings deal with relationships between men and women. Early on they were racier, which suited men and women over 25. Now it's because I've started making videos. The ratio is about 4:6 male to female. People used to sneer that my work was worthless and then keep coming back, and after a while they'd say, "ChuChu didn't let me down today." The real turn in running the page was when I started making videos. Everyone in that early cohort of page founders grew at about the same rate, around 500,000 two years ago, but once I made videos my numbers jumped. I made videos because what I did on Wretch was long-form, while Facebook's feed suits a single image-and-text post — the way you tell a story had changed. Video let me keep the pacing of long-form work. Most of all, nobody was doing it yet. My rule is: whatever everyone else is doing, I try not to do the same.

Q: Most well-known online illustrators share one habit — drawing off the news. Has that become a formula?

Cherng: That worries me, so my rule is that if someone else has drawn it, I don't. I also pick my subjects; if the tone doesn't fit, I'll pass. I've mostly stopped chasing the news now. I'd rather develop the character's own story. Shuang Shuang Cat: I prefer things with feeling. We have licensing in Japan, and Japanese readers obviously don't know us, but we can still work with face-mask brands or FamilyMart on the strength of a feeling. I do watch what's moving online, but Shuang Shuang Cat watches for what moves people. I also watch what users are doing — handwritten lettering is popular right now, so Shuang Shuang Cat works with that. ByeByeChuChu: If I do take up the news, I always tie it to relationships, so the news becomes a backdrop. When I'm working out a gag I'll imagine how other creators would draw it, and then avoid those directions.

Q: Has working in this field changed what you think the job of an illustrator is?

Cherng: I used to think illustration meant the little drawings tucked into print. Once I was inside it and started working on characters, I found there were so many directions to go — you can move from flat to three-dimensional. Shuang Shuang Cat: We used to shut ourselves in a room and draw. Taiwan's illustration scene has been fascinating these past few years, with unimaginable things happening. The three of us put on an exhibition together, and character licensing is the same story: it began with just drawing something, but because the drawing got noticed, we get to learn how to make it whole, building the character out of different materials. ByeByeChuChu: The field has changed a lot in the past two or three years, but we're still walking the road Japan walked earlier. Character management has only just become a job here. In the future there may be tie-ups with places — the way Studio Ghibli makes you think of Mitaka.

Cover image courtesy of HIM International