This comic features two of my favourite things: Tengu and Engrish. I’ve been wanting to find a place for some engrish in the strip for a long time and when I got the idea for this Tengu character, the lines practically wrote themselves. I have to say, it was incredibly difficult not go whole hog and have him speak entirely in Engrish.

As far as Engrish goes, I got some wonderful results for the poster by using Yahoo’s impossibly bad babelfish translator. The site is fiendishly awful for acquiring any sort of purposeful information from other languages. If attempting to translate something using it, please be aware that it spits forth only venomous lies and misinformation. However, if you like to use things improperly (as I do) for hilarious results, you would be wise to try translating something from english to japanese, taking the japanese results and translating them back to english. I believe William made some awesome Facebook statuses this way.

That said, please do not correct my Japanese. I do not speak the language and I didn’t even try to get anything right. The more wrong it is, the funnier it is to me.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

Japan is an interesting place, rife with strange creatures, some terrifying, some meant to be terrifying but that are actually hilarious. The Tengu falls into the latter category. There are a great many different kinds of Tengu, originating in different time periods from many different people and for gods only know what reasons exactly. These humanoids began their mythological lives as terrible bird demons and somehow became ridiculous red faced men with long noses and bulging eyes. Not what we would call a respectable and impressive retirement.