A comic strip series that many believe is based on an episode of the American sitcom Friends has recently gone viral in China. It is thought to be centered on a joke from the show that goes, "What's the one kind of boat that can never sink? A friend ship!"

In the Chinese comics, dubbed The Friendship Boat Capsizes, two penguins sit on either side of a boat and an action on the part of one leads to the boat sinking.

A 20-something cartoonist calling himself Nandongni published the first strip on his Sina Weibo microblog on April 2. It shows one of the penguins has lost weight while the other has not and the ship sinks. The message is the friendship has ended because the heavier penguin is jealous. It was forwarded more than 78,000 times within 10 days of being posted and Nandongni has since published additional comic strips about the penguins. The other works depict one penguin eating all of the food without sharing, one of the penguins finding a significant other, and one posting selfies of the two online shopping with the other penguin photoshopped out. All of the scenarios end with the ship going under.

In the final comic strip of the series, the friendship boat evolves into a romantic cruise ship after the two penguins confess their love for each other. But that, too, ends with the ship sinking. All the comics in the series combined have been viewed more than 500,000 times and Nandongni's microblog followers have increased from 200,000 to 920,000.

Nandongni is currently living in Beijing. He dropped out of university to study art and comic drawing after seeing works of a cartoonist from Taiwan, known only as Jimmy, in 2010. His first comic book was published by the Beijing Times Chinese Press in January last year. He created two penguins—a yellow one named Dongni and a black one called Ade—for his new comic series Penguins' Travelogue to the North, which also featured in the recent Friendship Boat series.

Why the popularity?

Nandongni told the Beijing Morning Post, a locally published newspaper in Beijing, that he thinks the Friendship Boat series has become so popular because it gives people an outlet to complain about their personal relationships.

In fact, the title of the series, The Friendship Boat Capsizes, has become a buzz-word with people applying it to everyday situations. For example, if a college student asks a classmate to buy lunch for him but is refused, he might say, "Our friendship boat capsizes instantly."

The expression has also given rise to other variations, such as "the ship of love sinks instantly," "youth disappears quickly" and "money just withdrawn will run out easily."

In response to the comic strips' popularity, Nandongni launched a competition on his microblog allowing netizens to replace the captions with their own. To his surprise, Internet users participated in the activity, creating a number of variations based on different professionals, including journalists, bank clerks and doctors, which have become even more popular than the original version.

A fan-created version casting one of the penguins as a journalist is among the most popular with the journalist penguin saying that he is working on a story after the other penguin asks him to accompany him to dinner. The ship sinks after the interaction. In another fan version, one penguin asks his doctor friend to go for dinner but the doctor says he has a surgery that night and the boat capsizes.

Culture critic Han Haoyue attributes the comics' popularity to the cuteness of the two penguin protagonists. "The cute images have aroused adults' nostalgia for their childhood," he said on his microblog. "The variations are mostly done by urban employees working under great pressure. As social expectations are high about these people, they have nowhere to release their pressure except through comics."

Zhang Chun, Director of the Nanjing Psychology Intervention Center in east China's Jiangsu Province, said that the Friendship Boat comic strips have underlined the vulnerable personal relationships that make up contemporary society. "There are only common interests instead of shared faith between friends; therefore friendship is more easily broken up," he said.

Flitting fame

The comic strip series is undoubtedly popular and a part of public discourse at the moment, but experts say that the trend will fade like many before it.

David Ferguson, an author and editor at the Foreign Languages Press, a subsidiary of the China International Publishing Group, attributes the Friendship Boat series' popularity to its originality and effectiveness. "It has a very simple message but you can use it hundreds of times for hundreds of different ways of getting the message across," he said.

Beijing Review interviewed five office workers in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen in Guangdong Province and two counties in Shandong Province. All of them have read the comics, but none know who the author is. Yang Guowei, a bank clerk in Shanghai, said that it's a fad that will be forgotten in a few days.

When asked about their impressions of the comics, three of them said they are cute and funny and nothing else.

Ferguson said that for a cartoon to become popular, it first needs to be of good quality, citing two successful examples—the American cartoon Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz and Dilbert by Scott Adams.

However, he is not optimistic that Friendship Boat's popularity can last given the rapidly changing trends on the Internet.

"I think it will be increasingly difficult for cartoons like the Friendship Boat to remain popular because there is so much online media now. People are constantly being bombarded with new things. New ideas are coming into your space of knowledge every day," Ferguson told Beijing Review. "So I would say it could last, but I think it's more likely that it will be popular for a while and then it'll be replaced by something else."

Although the Friendship Boat comics have brought Nandongni fame and even made him an online celebrity, he was vexed by the widespread plagiarism of his work online. He claimed that some plagiarized versions of his work were viewed more than 100,000 times.

Regardless of his comics' newfound fame, Nandongni told the Beijing Morning Post that he didn't expect to become so well known. What he wants to do most is to concentrate on his drawing.

Copyedited by Jordyn Dahl

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